For The Love Of Port

I'm looking at these two bottles of (the same?) H&H malmsey and trying to figure out the bottling year of the bottle with the stencil label.

It has an IVM selo, which could mean it should have been bottled any time between 1979 and 2006, right? I wonder if it's possible to tighten this range. When did H&H start printing bottling dates on the labels? Was it some time during the 90s? 00s? Since this bottle does not have an explicit bottling year printed on the back, so maybe it could help to narrow it down. My guess would be that this madeira was bottled during the 80s. But the bottle doesn't look that old, so I must be wrong.

The second bottle has a bottling year on the back - 1986 - but I wonder why the label is of a different style. What can be said about the selo - is it just a different IVM variant since the madeira was bottled in the 80s?

Cheers,
Yev

By the style of the selo and label, I'd say the older one is early to mid 80's. The newer one in the 2000's. H&H has been putting bottling dates on their high end bottles since at least the mid 20th Century.

My puzzlement is about the selo. If a madeira was bottled in the 2000s, is it possible for it to have an IVM selo and not an IVBAM selo?

The IVBAM was established in 2006 and took over from IVM as a regulatory body. I guess shippers could still use IVM selos issued before that, but any new issues from that point should have been from IVBAM.

The selo is basically a tax stamp, so if they had old ones lying around which were already paid for, the shippers could still use them. The numbers on the selos have no relationship to the bottling date. Some shippers keep track of the numbers of the selos, but some do not.

Thank you, Michael and Eric. That's what I was wondering about if a bottle with a bottling year passed the IVM 'era' could still have an IVM selo.