For The Love Of Port

What do you think of this article on LBV which appeared in yesterday's SF Chronicle?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... &type=wine

I thought it was a reasonably good and informative article, given the length constraints the author was no doubt working within. Nothing stood out as glaringly false or misrepresentative. I liked the tasting notes, particularly for the 2003 Fonseca Unfiltered LBV. I've bought a couple bottles, likely will buy some more, but had not previously seen any tasting notes about this.

Not to be excessively critical -- again, I'm sure the writer was subject to length constraints -- but the distinction between filtered and unfiltered LBV was not pointed out and was not uniformly pointed out in the name of the tasted LBV ports. The 2003 Fonseca LBV, for example, is unfiltered but was not identified as such. The Smith Woodhouse LBV, by contrast, was identified by the author as unfiltered and unfined, which was good. This would be something I would have liked to have seen pointed out, but I appreciate that there is only so many nuances and details you can put into a short article. And on a second read it really was a short article!!! I think that really says it all. So, good article.

For it's length, I agree that it was nice, and good exposure for Port I think. One problem I've found in the filtered/unfiltered arena is that for a lot of bottles it isn't clear which is the case. I presume if the bottle doesn't say one way or the other that is is filtered, but this could be a bad assumption.