Rune EG wrote:During the 2011 FTLOP Harvest Tour we visited Malvedos, and had at that time seven differant vintages of Malvedos,
2009 being one of them. I noted "Buy" on the tasting note.
Unfortunately it seems to be available only in US, according to Wine Searcher.
Rune - if I recall correctly, at the time SFE announced that they had made and would market a 2009 Malvedos they also announced that it would be released late onto the market. It wasn't said how long they would they would keep the bottles back, but I think they are still sitting on the stocks. This is probably why you haven't been able to find them outside the US.
And back on topic, what I've heard over the last year is that every port producer I've spoken to plans to submit samples to the IVDP next spring requesting approval for release as a Vintage Port. In the case of the big producers there was gentle vagueness whether that would be as a single quinta wine or as a full blend - but it sounded like there would be plenty of 2017 port to choose from and, like Tom, I've been mighty impressed with what I've tasted so far.
But when was the label put on that bottle? It doesn't look like 1933. When did they decide to call it LBV?
Exactly, the product class had no mainstream presence prior to '64
Remember, prior to WW2 there was very little regulations when it came to formal names/classification. For the most part you could group them into a few categories, there were simply tawny's, Colheita's, some form of a Ruby and Vintage Port. It was far simpler than what is formalized now. A couple examples are Sandeman's use of "stars" to denote a cheap ruby up to what would now be considered a good LBV. Colheita's were often called a name with the year of the vintage printed somewhere on the label. Rubies used all kinds of various "brand" names.
Trying to get nit-picky about exactly what it may or may have not been called then versus now is a red herring. The fact is, by today's standard it's a Late Bottle Vintage. I fully understand this could have been a VP that, years later, had to be re-classified as an LBV as the regulations changed. But that is the nature of the Douro then and even now. IIRC, the 1982 Niepoort LBV* was a VP they decided to reclassify as an LBV. And if you really want to get picky, Garrafeira* is nothing more than an LBV that is later re-bottled/corked into smaller bottles. Technically, it's still an LBV. Heck, it wasn't even an official category until relatively recently. I don't see anyone raising those issue.
*just picking two off the top of my head for ease of discussion.
Tom Archer wrote:Exactly, the product class had no mainstream presence prior to '64
Adrian likes to claim that Taylor invented LBVs. While that's obviously not true, it's even unclear whether or not they created the class. Read "class" as "name" if you want.
However what does seem to be true is that Taylor popularized the class and made it something that could stand on its own as a class. As Andy pointed out, the mish-mash of rules in the early part of the century means that Port that could have been (and was) bottled as VP prior to WWII now had its own category, so many existing bottlings - such as Ramos Pinto's 1927 - were re-categorized as LBVs. Some may have never been categorized prior to that, so even to say "re-categorized" may be incorrect. There really weren't that many rules prior to the war, and even the ones they had weren't followed religiously.
Al B. wrote:And back on topic, what I've heard over the last year is that every port producer I've spoken to plans to submit samples to the IVDP next spring requesting approval for release as a Vintage Port. In the case of the big producers there was gentle vagueness whether that would be as a single quinta wine or as a full blend - but it sounded like there would be plenty of 2017 port to choose from and, like Tom, I've been mighty impressed with what I've tasted so far.
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