Appearance
Fairly deep strawy yellow to amber with old gold highlights.
Nose
Mature with considerable depth and more concentration than your average Fino. There are humid slightly almondy, buttery strawy, yeasty acetaldehyde notes and traces of autolysis from the cabezuela and vary slight oxidation which combine to give considerable complexity along with great freshness given its age. You could sniff it for hours.
Palate
Intensely flavoured and quite full with all that attractive almondy flor bitterness but so much more: it has a soft round briny saline butteriness to match and a dry chalky texture with all the components in perfect balance. This is a serious wine, very dry, pure, natural, complex and very long. Superb.
Comments
I thought it would be instructive to have another look at this classic Fino as the bodega has greatly increased the capacity of the solera, to double in fact. This gives the firm more wine to sell in the lower price category and thus increase turnover, since the other wines in the range are the slower selling VOS or VORS. They make two 3,000 bottle sacas of Fino per year, in spring and autumn, and the wine is bottled en rama after nearly twelve years of biological ageing. That is more than most and produces the fuller, more serious, more mature style of the past. Added to that, this sample was bottled in May 2017 so it has a couple of years of bottle age as well. The result is a stunning, complex and delicious Fino in the classic Jerez style.
Price
29.95, De Albariza
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