Amontillado del Castillo 1/38 21.5%, Lustau Almacenista

Appearance
Deep amber, polished chestnut with copper tinted highlights.
Nose

Full, almost powerful, the alcohol is noticeable, with lots of hazelnut and toasted almond, traces of exotic woods, old polished furniture and old Sherry butts along with a faint notes of orange peel and linseed oil. It has a certain salty maritime air and a distant bitterness as well.

Palate

Big at first then subsides a little allowing all that flavour to flood out. Apparently it contains 5.5g/l residual sugar, but it tastes drier than that, though it is certainly well rounded and smooth with plenty of glycerine to round off trace notes of tannin. It is very slightly on the strong side, but has all that lovely Amontillado nuttiness with woody hints ending in a dry-textured finish.

Comments

This wine is comparatively new to the Almacenista range, as is the name of its producer: Antonio Caballero y Sobrinos, about whom few people know much. Really, it is a solera owned by the family of Luis Caballero, owners of Lustau. It is kept in the bodega of the castle of El Puerto de Santa Maria, hence the name. The Castillo San Marcos, as it is properly called, was built on the orders of king Alfonso X "The Wise" in the XIII century on the site of a X century Moorish mosque very close to the Guadalete, and is owned by Caballero, who have other bodegas in the vicinity. The solera consists of 38 butts and the wine has an average age of 18 years. It won gold at both the IWC and IWSC in 2018 and scored 93 Parker points. It comes in a bottle which looks similar to the rest of the range, but is a good inch taller due to a deep punt.

Price
22.85 per 50cl Licores Corredera