Late Bottled Vintage

Late Bottled Vintage — LBV on almost every label — is Port from a single named harvest that is left in wood for four to six years and then bottled, rather than the two or so years a Vintage Port gets. That extra time in cask rounds the tannin and takes the edge off the fruit, so the wine arrives already open for business: deep ruby-garnet, sweet and warming at around 19 to 20 percent alcohol, full of blackberry, plum and black cherry over cocoa, violet and clove. It is one of the biggest-selling premium styles of Port and a fixture of by-the-glass lists, because most LBV is fined and filtered before bottling and so needs no decanting and no cellar. A smaller, traditional camp bottles it unfiltered, and those wines throw a sediment, keep their grip and go on developing in glass for a decade or more.