ThePortForum.com

Posted: **04:02 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

About an hour and a half ago, sitting in the old Niepoort lodge, with Nick Delaforce, Rachel Brown and I, AW77 was inspired by a stroke of genius. We tasted Niepoort's first LBV, the 1975, after André asked about the optimum drinking window for Niepoort LBVs. We agreed it was quite excellent, and André then suggested a Niepoort LBV vertical in London. Nick said he would come to London if we could organise it.

Who is interested, and who has what, and when would be good?

Posted: **09:01 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

Me, nothing, whenever.

Posted: **10:23 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

DRT wrote:Me, nothing, whenever.

+1.

Posted: **10:39 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

UK availability not good, and I don't think I will be alone in objecting to the price of the 1975

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Garrafeira Nacional in Portugal have lots of older vintages (from the 1980s and 1990s) at prices between £50-£100 per bottle excluding tax. This could be an expensive exercise in evaluating LBVs that might not lead to a willingness to buy.

Posted: **11:32 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

Oh yes please-put me down for this; any date as long as sufficient notice is given so as I can arrange clearance (interesting also that I didn't see this post before suggesting a similar vertical for Warre in a separate post).

Ian

Posted: **13:29 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

Let's take our time over this one. Wolfgang or Axel may have reserves; others may also have stock they're willing to farm out for adoption. The intention is to look at LBVs with different amounts of bottle age and see how they behave. The 75 was really fantastic, essentially a vintage in all but name. I don't think we need to worry about whether or not this encourages future purchases, more that it can educate us in the ageing potential and optimum drinking windows for this category of port. I would be happy to co-ordinate this if there is interest and agreement; if we need to make appeals to others' generosity then there are multiple ways in which we can endeavour to repay that generosity, in kind or in cash.

Posted: **13:37 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

I am happy to defer to your organisation — gently assuming that “75 was really fantastic” was meant specifically rather than generally.

Posted: **13:39 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

jdaw1 wrote:I am happy to defer to your organisation — gently assuming that “75 was really fantastic” was meant specifically rather than generally.

Quite. TN (from memory) to follow.

Posted: **17:36 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

Our collective experience with older unfiltered Warre LBV has been very positive; It would be very interesting to try the same with Niepoort (I am assuming we're talking about unfiltered LBV?). I suspect it will be much harder to source a selection of such older Niepoort LBV bottles and that we may not have many between us; if that is the case, I wonder if it might be possible for us to source a "tasting in a box" ex-cellars, perhaps?

Posted: **22:24 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

PhilW wrote:Our collective experience with older unfiltered Warre LBV has been very positive; It would be very interesting to try the same with Niepoort (I am assuming we're talking about unfiltered LBV?). I suspect it will be much harder to source a selection of such older Niepoort LBV bottles and that we may not have many between us; if that is the case, I wonder if it might be possible for us to source a "tasting in a box" ex-cellars, perhaps?

Question posed to Nick D, last night:
"Why don't you make more of the fact that your LBVs are all unfiltered?"
Nick: "That goes back to Dirk's father, who said he didn't understand why they should put something on the label to say they don't do something that they've never done."
I think an ex-cellars option for those harder to source years is most sensible. Suggest we pursue this once we hear from all possible participants and find out whether anyone has a stash.

Posted: **23:22 Sun 02 Mar 2014**

Other shippers have sold us a stash of LBVs. If there were LBVs with which Niepoort could bear parting in quantity, I much prefer to include samples of those.

Posted: **07:24 Mon 03 Mar 2014**

jdaw1 wrote:Other shippers have sold us a stash of LBVs. If there were LBVs with which Niepoort could bear parting in quantity, I much prefer to include samples of those.

Me too! I fear EDN has not a lot of old surplus stock as sometimes other shippers has!

But we can try. I am in favour of a comparison tasting of 10-12 Warre Traditional LBV vs 10-12 Niepoort LBV tasting in pairs. I have currently only one bt of Niepoort LBV 05 and of Traditional Warre, 81, 82, 84, 86, 94 and 01.

regards

WS1

Posted: **11:18 Mon 03 Mar 2014**

First of all, thank you Daniel for posting this thread.

I have 07,08 and 09. But could also get 03 (Axel still should have a bottle) and 89 (old stock of a shop in Cologne, but priced at 69 €).
When I am back from Porto I will ring up the general importer of Niepoort wines for Germany (it´s their biggest market with very old ties) and ask them if they know some shop with old stock. On their homepage they list some older vintages but I`m not sure if they are available from them: http://www.fast-alles-ueber-wein.de/wein.php?Wein_id=33

As for the date of the tasting: if we did it in October or November that would give us more time to hunt for old bottles.

Posted: **06:47 Wed 05 Mar 2014**

While I have a '97 and '99, I have previously committed them to an "Old LBV" tasting coming up, as well as the minor issue of me being located on the wrong continent.

All that aside, I did recently pop a bottle of the '99 and found that it needed at least 12 hours decant, but was subsequently fantastic, better than a good number of VPs I've had. I highly recommend finding said vintage for your lineup.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Posted: **16:29 Wed 05 Mar 2014**

Today I phoned the German general importer of Niepoort. The vintages mentioned on their webpage are for reference only. They only have the lastest LBV on offer. They also told me that Niepoort in general sell all their LBV and do not keep them back (although asking Dirk or Verena might not hurt).
There are quite some LBVs at the Garrafeira Nacional:
http://www.garrafeiranacional.com/vinho ... o-lbv.html
So we might get some vintages there.
Today I was lucky to find 3 bottles of the 2000 Niepoort LBV in an online-shop (for 21 € each incl. shipment) and ordered them promptly.
So now I could provide one bottle of the 2000 as well.

Posted: **17:28 Wed 05 Mar 2014**

I will send a message to Dirk alerting him to this thread and ask if he would sell us a 'tasting in a box' with a view to possibly making some stock available to us subsequently, to buy in quantity.

Posted: **19:46 Wed 05 Mar 2014**

The Garrafeira Nacional just informed me by e-mail that they do free shipping to the UK if you order for more than 100€ (with a maximum of 30kg) through Chronopost.
So we could use that shop to get some LBVs for our tasting.

Posted: **19:47 Wed 05 Mar 2014**

Email sent to Dirk, Verena and Nick.

Posted: **14:27 Thu 06 Mar 2014**

An email has been received from Dirk:

Dirk Niepoort, in an email, and with characteristic generosity, wrote:that is a great idea. we are most happy to send you some samples of the older vintages of our LBV´s

our oldest LBV is the 1975 which we never really liked for being very light and thin…BUT
these days we love it for being sexy, fine, elegant and actually quite complex…
the best is clearly the LBV 1981 of which we have two different bottlings (one in a vintage port bt and one in niepoort bt) which are both , even though quite different very very good. i would actually dare to say they are the best LBV ever made.

we will send you the LBV´s through raymond reynolds.

My original email simply asked if Niepoort would consider selling us a 'tasting in a box', with an option to buy further stocks if individuals were interested, so this is a very kind and a very fine offer.

Posted: **14:52 Thu 06 Mar 2014**

Thank you Dirk (who is a thoroughly good egg).

Note for other shippers: when we ask for bottles, what is wanted is access to bottles otherwise inaccessible. We expect and are willing to pay a fair price. The privilege we seek is access.

Posted: **17:48 Thu 06 Mar 2014**

djewesbury wrote:My original email simply asked if Niepoort would consider selling us a 'tasting in a box', with an option to buy further stocks if individuals were interested, so this is a very kind and a very fine offer.

Most excellent - I would add my thanks also to Dirk, much appreciated, and I look forward to seeing how they taste.

jdaw1 wrote:Note for other shippers: when we ask for bottles, what is wanted is access to bottles otherwise inaccessible. We expect and are willing to pay a fair price. The privilege we seek is access.

Well put.

Posted: **17:49 Thu 06 Mar 2014**

I have reiterated, by email, our willingness to pay any costs associated with this, as Dirk sees fit.

Posted: **02:24 Fri 07 Mar 2014**

I too do think that we should pay for the bottles provided to us for this tasting. This is only fair. Plus we should give Dirk an appropriate gift for providing these old LBVs to us (perhaps a bottle or two of an old and aged Riesling since he really likes Riesling. Giving a mayor port shipper some port would be like carrying coals to Newcastle.)

Posted: **10:24 Tue 18 Mar 2014**

People - Dirk is now running this as a masterclass at the BFT! Hurry!

Posted: **10:45 Tue 18 Mar 2014**

Still waiting for a confirmation back on the Colheitas masterclass...

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