Late Bottled Vintage (LBV) Port is made from wine from a single year, but instead of being aged from its second year onward in bottles, it is aged 2 to 6 years in a cask. Once bottled and sold on, it doesn’t need aging, is ready to drink, and doesn’t need decanting because any sediment in it settled in the cask during the aging.
It was designed to be a mid-range Port, in terms of price of quality and price, between Ruby and Vintage.
It’s also “easier to use” than Vintage Port, in that you can’t crack open a bottle of Vintage Port just to have one glass. With Vintage Port, when you open a bottle, it pretty much all needs to be drunk up within 24 hours at the most. With LBV Port, however, you can open it, serve a glass, recork the bottle, and then finish using the bottle up over the next week or two. This makes it popular in the restaurant business, because proprietors don’t have to charge customers for a full bottle.
Storage Hints
Store opened LBV in the fridge for up to 2 weeks.
History Notes
Late Bottled Vintage Port was developed in the 1970s in response to restaurant demand to have a good quality port that could be sold by the glass. Vintage Port is an even higher-quality Port, but because the whole bottle has to be drunk once it is opened, sales of port in restaurants were falling in favour of other after-dinner tipple.
