Winemaker Notes
Pairs well with robust soft and hard cheeses, desserts made with chocolate, or fresh berries.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
Taylor introduced the filtered, stopper-corked style of LBV in the 1950s, offering a top-quality wine that’s ready to pour on release and stays fresher after opening than a Vintage Port. This may be the best wine they’ve produced in the style. It carries some of Taylor’s signature tannic structure, a note of austere mineral power to underline the bold fruit richness. That fruit comes in octaves of cherry flavor, floral cassis notes and scents of raspberry cordial. Expressive and delicious.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2011 Late Bottled Vintage Port (bottled in October 2015) is a field blend aged for 58 months. It comes with a bar top cork and 106 grams per liter of residual sugar. Inky black, this highly extracted Port has sensual texture and an unctuous finish laced with delicious, primary fruit flavor. It's a rather sexy LBV this year, big, dense and mouth-coating. It has a fair bit of power, too. For an LBV to drink now, this is simply beautiful. It is not necessarily expected to go anywhere--it's made for drinking now--but it can certainly hold if you choose to do so, barring cork failures.
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.