Fino 15% 3a saca, Bodega Lorente y Barba

Appearance

Quite deep for a Fino, pale amber with golden highlights.

Nose

Full, complex and very interesting. From the darker colour one would expect it to have some oxidation, and while there is a little in the background it harmonises perfectly with the wine, and the aroma is super fresh with notes of almond, sourdough, a faint salinity and a gentle bitterness from the flor. Ageing has been taken close to the limit of the flor giving superb depth of character.

Palate

On the full side, and the fairly intense flavour at the start develops great elegance and the complexity builds as that light oxidative note comes through combining perfectly with the nuts. It is good and dry and fresh with comparatively low acidity yet perfectly balanced and has a long clean finish with a hint of dry albariza texture. Delicious.

Comments

This is a textbook example of Fino from Jerez where the flor gets pretty thin or even disappears temporarily during summer and winter allowing a little more oxidation than in Sanlúcar where the flor is constant all year round. It is the third commercial saca of this very fine Fino and comes from butt no 16 of the solera. Only just over a third of the wine (or about 225 litres) is withdrawn at any one time however, so the rest of the wine in the butt can retain its individual character. Each saca is therefore the produce of a single butt and accordingly very small, but the exciting bit is that each butt is very slightly different.

Price

14 euros, Licores Corredera

Oloroso 18% 3a saca, Bodega Lorente y Barba

Appearance
Bright deep mahogany fading to amber with ruby highlights and a trace of green at the rim.

Nose

Full, aromatic and classic. Lovely rich, open textured Oloroso which defines the terms "Oloroso" and "vino generoso" with attractive notes of oak, walnut, toasted almond, leather, toasted bread, hints of cinnamon, marmalade and even faint traces of coffee.

Palate

Quite full bodied, dry but nicely rounded off by a little glycerine, well structured and textured but with very little tannin which gives a serious wine lots of charm. There are traces of caramel, tobacco and that marmalade and cinnamon and the wine is very long, tasty and super smooth.

Comments

This is the welcome third saca of this lovely Oloroso and, as is the practice of the bodega of bottling wine from individual butts of the solera, this is from butt 26. The bodega building which is  quite possibly the oldest in Jerez, is perfectly located by a well dating back to at least Moorish times which helps provide cool humidity for the flor on the Fino. The soleras of Fino and Oloroso have been in the family for three generations.

Price

27.95 euros

 26

Fino L&B 15%, Bodegas Lorente & Barba

Appearance

A little deeper than some, bright brassy strawy gold with golden glints.
Nose

Deep and complex with lots of character. This is a Fino aged towards the limit with quite intense aromas of maturity; straw, hints of oxidation, bitter flor, sourdough, toasted bread, dry autumn leaves, the very smell of a bodega, blonde tobacco and hints of the Amontillado it could become. Lovely.

Palate

Full, clean and packed with flavour. It has a subtle balance between the bitterness of the flor - which must be pretty thin by now - with the roundness born only of maturity, a buttery hint of cabezuela and those tantalising hints of Amontillado. This wine has reached its moment, it is magnificent. A Sherry connoisseur's Fino.
Comments

This bodega is new on the scene but, as is the norm in Jerez, the producers have a long family history in the trade and the wines come from old soleras. Another novelty is the way they bottle the wine; instead of the usual system of blending the wine taken from each solera butt to achieve homogeneity, they bottle the wine from each butt separately and write on the label which butt the wine came from and which saca, even numbering the bottles individually. Now there is traceability for you! Within reason, no two bottles taste the same - and that is one thing that is so exciting about Sherry. They try to age the Fino to the limit of the flor and it has an average age of around twelve years in a 500 years  old bodega with perfect conditions which really helps. Naturally it is bottled en rama. This bottle was from the 2nd saca, butt no.7 and bottle number 125. Only about 225 bottles are taken from the butt at any one saca. The wine is sealed with a driven cork with the year of the saca (2016) printed on it.

Price
14,50 euros, La Tienda del Jerez

Oloroso L&B 18%, Bodegas Lorente & Barba

Appearance

Deep old mahogany with copper highlights fading through amber to a trace of green at the rim.
Nose
Attractive, full, fragrant and forthcoming, it has an air of age and class. It is complex with interesting nuances of oak, cinnamon, walnut, vanilla and traces of pasa, orange peel and burnt sugar, but they are all well harmonised into a wine with great character and individuality.
Palate
It is full bodied at first and very well rounded with a slight and surprising hint of raisiny sweetness as if just a drop of PX had been added. If so, it is a traditional practice with old wines and perfectly legal. A delightful generous mellowness then follows as it opens out, richly nutty with that trace of brown sugar, beautifully controlled oxidation and very little tannin and the wine finishes slightly lighter than expected yet it has considerable length, and dangerous drinkability. It is quite delicious.

Comments

Mauricio Lorente and Julio Barba have established their own bodega based on stocks of wine which have been in the family for a long time, so their wines are new on the market, at least in bottled form. Everything is done by hand by the traditional methods; no pumps, filtration or bottling line here. The bodega building itself is over 500 years old and provides the perfect conditions for ageing. Wines for bottling are taken from the individual solera butts only when they are deemed to be perfect. They are not blended together, so any differences in the wines from each butt are celebrated, and the numbers of the saca, butt and bottle are written on the label. These are single barrel Sherries and there is only ever a maximum of 225 bottles from each butt. This delightful Oloroso has about 18 years solera age, and it comes from saca 2, butt 26 and Oloroso bottle 39. Naturally it was bottled en rama (unfiltered) by hand and has a driven cork.
Price
27.90, La Tienda del Jerez

Bodegas: Lorente & Barba

This is a new firm, established in 2016, but the wines and the bodega are old. It is run by two partners; Mauricio Lorente and Julio Barba. Mauricio’s great great grandfather was in the Sherry business and had a modest bodega which he passed on to his son at the end of the XIX century. He passed it on to his son, Onofre, who was a clinical and oenological pharmacist. He bought Bodegas Lukol and sold Sherry as well as Jerez Quinado La Enfermera and a Sherry based aphrodisiac containing yohimbine, which had modest success. He later sold the bodega and its commercial brands but retained the best of the family soleras, and these were inherited by Mauricio Lorente’s father, who was also called Onofre and was also a pharmacist and analyist, and who also had a bodega, in Calle Cabezas where he started in the 1970s as an almacenista.

The knowledge and skills of his forebears in the days before oenologists meant that when Mauricio inherited the wines they had been carefully looked after and he decided to establish a bodega with Julio and sell Sherry. They acquired a lovely bodega which is 500 years old, constructed from stone and brick with thick walls, low roof and hand carved single block stone pillars, in Calle Ceniza, an area where some of the oldest bodegas were built. As the street was re-paved over the centuries the bodega floor is now about one and a half metres below street level.

Another giveaway as to its age is the fact that it has two stories and the upper one would have been used to store grain and straw in the days before the advent of the “cathedral bodegas”. The bodega also has a well dating back to Moorish times, which once had a waterwheel, and it is said that the well never dried up even in the severest drought. For that reason, the first fire station in Jerez was installed in an adjacent building. The well is referred to in a book from 1261 listing property divided among the supporters of king Alfonso X “The Wise” when he took Jerez from the Moors.

The bodega is the oldest in Jerez still functioning as such and is still perfect for ageing wines. The firm has launched two wines to start with; a Fino and an Oloroso. At each saca 200 - 225 bottles (or a third of the contents) are filled directly from each butt. The wine drawn from each butt is not blended for homogeneity, so these are single butt wines, and the label of each bottle carries the number of the butt it was filled from and the date of the saca, so there can be slight variation between bottles from the same saca, making it even more interesting. And of course they are bottled en rama.

With the Fino they have stretched out the ageing under flor for to the maximum, helped by the excellent conditions in the bodega. It is darker and more intense than younger wines and is around 12 years old. The Oloroso is between 18-20 years old and intense yet elegant and very long. So far they are only selling these two wines, but others are in the pipeline.