Winemaker Notes
Excellent with fully flavored cheeses, especially blue cheeses such as Stilton or Roquefort. It is also delicious with desserts made with chocolate or berry fruits.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Black cherry fruit and sweet herbs on the nose, before generous, weighty plummy fruit, inky spice and kirsch backed by ripe tannins.
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Decanter
Black cherry fruit and sweet herbs on the nose, before generous, weighty plummy fruit, inky spice and kirsch backed by ripe tannins.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2012 Late Bottled Vintage Port is an unfiltered field blend and comes in with 105 grams of residual sugar. It was bottled with a bartop cork after five years in used French oak. Sexy but elegant, this is chock-full of delicious fruit, sweet on the end and relatively fresh.
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Wine Spectator
The 2012 Late Bottled Vintage Port is an unfiltered field blend and comes in with 105 grams of residual sugar. It was bottled with a bar-top cork after five years in used French oak. Sexy but elegant, this is chock-full of delicious fruit, sweet on the end and relatively fresh. The mid-palate is just average in depth, but the classic Port flavors are all up front. In its youth, it does have a bit of an exuberant feel despite the freshness. Generally, people don't age LBVs with bar-top corks, but this can hold, if there no cork failure, and develop a bit too. Happily, you can also drink it right now.
Port is a sweet, fortified wine with numerous styles: Ruby, Tawny, Vintage, Late Bottled Vintage (LBV), White, Colheita, and a few unusual others. It is blended from from the most important red grapes of the Douro Valley, based primarily on Touriga Nacional with over 80 other varieties approved for use. Most Ports are best served slightly chilled at around 55-65°F. To learn more, see our full Port Wine Guide
The home of Port—perhaps the most internationally acclaimed beverage—the Douro region of Portugal is one of the world’s oldest delimited wine regions, established in 1756. The vineyards of the Douro, set on the slopes surrounding the Douro River (known as the Duero in Spain), are incredibly steep, necessitating the use of terracing and thus, manual vineyard management as well as harvesting. The Douro's best sites, rare outcroppings of Cambrian schist, are reserved for vineyards that yield high quality Port.
While more than 100 indigenous varieties are approved for wine production in the Douro, there are five primary grapes that make up most Port and the region's excellent, though less known, red table wines. Touriga Nacional is the finest of these, prized for its deep color, tannins and floral aromatics. Tinta Roriz (Spain's Tempranillo) adds bright acidity and red fruit flavors. Touriga Franca shows great persistence of fruit and Tinta Barroca helps round out the blend with its supple texture. Tinta Cão, a fine but low-yielding variety, is now rarely planted but still highly valued for its ability to produce excellent, complex wines.
White wines, generally crisp, mineral-driven blends of Arinto, Viosinho, Gouveio, Malvasia Fina and an assortment of other rare but local varieties, are produced in small quantities but worth noting.
With hot summers and cool, wet winters, the Duoro has a maritime climate.