Fonseca Unfiltered LBV 2018 Port

Wonderfully exuberant, pungent, full, aromatic nose. Luscious, ripe, black cherry and plum fruit with notes of cedar and spice. The wine is wonderfully rich, rounded, concentrated, with layers juicy berry flavours and attractive notes of cedar. An elegant wine with good complexity and a lovely, intense finish full of flavour.

LBV was developed as an alternative to Vintage Port for more relaxed and informal occasions. Like Vintage, LBV is a very high quality Port from a single year. However, unlike Vintage Port, which is bottled after only two years in wood, LBV is bottled after four to six years and is ready to drink when bottled. The wines used to produce Fonseca LBV were drawn from a reserve of some of the best full-bodied red Ports produced and harvest, from grapes grown on Fonseca’s own vineyards and on other top properties in the Cima Corgo and Douro Superior areas of the Douro. LBV Unfiltered is aged in large wooden vats and then drawn off into bottle with no fining or filtration. The result is a naturally expressive wine which has sacrificed none of its depth and fullness of flavour that benefits from been decanted. A limited quantity of this outstanding blend was produced.

Established in the same year as the battle of Waterloo, 1815, Fonseca is one of the most celebrated Port houses. Wines continue to be made by the Guimarens family - now fifth generation winemakers - in the firm's 3 estates of Quinta do Panascal, Cruzeiro and Santo António in the Douro Valley.

James Suckling commented in his book on Vintage Port: "The vintage Ports of Fonseca are perhaps the most consistently great of them all. Not only do they have a striking fleshiness and powerful richness when young, but they retain that youthfulness for decades."