A decade of Noval LBV

Christian Seely, Top Man at AXA Millésimes, the insurance giant's wine arm, had decided that the launch of the Quinta do Noval unfiltered LBV 2004 port was a good moment to show all the vintages of this wine back to the first in 1994.

Not that Noval did not make an LBV before that but Seely arrived there in 1993 and so the 1994 was the first of the new regime: the fruit treated very much like that for vintage port, with the grapes food trodden in stone lagares (pictured), no filtration, and then four years in barrel. The...