Vintage Late Bottled, not LBV

[Frederick Blais]

I'm curious to know what was your best experience with a Vintage that was late bottled.

Like this one : https://www.garrafeiranacional.com/1958 ... porto.html

[David Spriggs]

It's effectively an LBV. This may have been before the strict rules of LBV. I would expect that this 1958 LBV was very good at one time.

[Frederick Blais]

This is exactly my point David, look at the label, it is a Vintage that was late bottled, not a Port that was made to fit in a strict category like the modern LBV.

I'd really be curious to try and I don't know if any company has the stocks to have 2 Vintage Ports of the same year, one bottled after 2 years and one bottled after 4.

[Moses Botbol]

This is exactly my point David, look at the label, it is a Vintage that was late bottled, not a Port that was made to fit in a strict category like the modern LBV.

I'd really be curious to try and I don't know if any company has the stocks to have 2 Vintage Ports of the same year, one bottled after 2 years and one bottled after 4.

Wouldn't there be a British shipper equivalent for that vintage; bottled in 2 years instead?

[Glenn E.]

It's effectively an LBV. This may have been before the strict rules of LBV. I would expect that this 1958 LBV was very good at one time.

I agree with David. LBV wasn't a category yet, but as you no doubt remember Taylor "invented" the category in the 1960s. This may have been an experiment on the way toward the creation of the LBV category... or maybe not. Who knows? Sometimes barrels "got lost" and discovered too late to be what they were intended to be, so they'd get repurposed. But the fact that it actually says "late bottled" on the label leads me to believe that this was Taylor working their way toward LBV as a category.

At the very least, I'm pretty sure this was before any of the stricter rules. VP was VP "because I declare it so" and there weren't rules about it having to be bottled X years after harvest. The 18-30 month rule came about later, probably at least de facto when the rules for LBV were created. I don't recall having seen any "late" VP bottlings from the 60s but have noticed both 2 and 3 year bottlings in that time frame. (1967 Vargellas was bottled 4 ways - there are bottlings from both England and Oporto from both 1969 and 1970.)

[Alan Gardner]

Way back in 1998, we had a Fonseca vertical with Bruce Guimaraens, when he visited Canada. Among our tasting wines were some 'English Bottled' Fonseca ports which we compared with the Fonseca bottlings. For 1970 we actually had 3 'versions' an English bottled (1972), the Fonseca bottling and another English (actually Scottish) bottling from 1973. This was the first time Bruce had seen this, although he told us that Fonseca had no control over when the English merchants bottled the Port and he suspected it had just been 'forgotten' - apparently this wasn't uncommon, although the 'smart merchants' would have put 'Bottled 1972' on the label anyway [I know, can you believe that a wine merchant would be that devious?].
'Legally' the later bottling could only be termed a 'Crusted Port' - but because of the price difference, that would be a disastrous business decision.

We actually had a long discussion about the effects of potentially bottling in January 1972 (14 months after production) vs. December 1972 (26 months after production) - almost double the elapsed time, so presumably major potential differences. Bruce acknowledged that this 'experiment' had never been done (to his knowledge) - Fonseca bottled whenever their permanent staff had a relatively quiet month and could be moved to assist bottling, rather than pruning the vineyards, harvesting etc.

[Frederick Blais]

Very interesting Alan, thanks for sharing! Which 1970 did you prefer in the end?

[Alan Gardner]

My notes were not transcribed to computer and I 'cleaned out' in 2015 when I moved. So original source material has gone.
However, I recall that the English bottlings was my favourite - the 'Scottish' bottling came last and the Fonseca bottling was in the middle.

As a separate tasting, one of my Port groups in Toronto held a "1970 Fonseca" tasting of 6 different bottlings of this wine (the three at the Bruce G tasting plus 3 additional English bottlings). Obviously this weighted towards the English bottlings and I recall that 4 of the wines were 'roughly the same'. Again, my notes are now discarded, but other members of this group may still have the results - I'll follow up (albeit we've been COVID-isolated for over a year now and haven't met recently).