Palo Cortado 1730 VORS 18%, Alvaro Domecq

Appearance

Bright copper-hued amber-mahogany, slight trace green at rim, legs.

Nose

Very elegant and complex, slightly phenolic wood notes are subordinated by a hint of glyceric sweetness with an almond and hazelnut character. Beautiful balance and all sorts of subtleties with traces of polished furniture, tobacco, honey, nuts and those wood notes but all in perfect harmony. An object lesson in balance, and most attractive.

Palate

Full and quite intense, dry and concentrated, it is fuller on the palate than one might have imagined from the nose. This is an old wine and it inevitably has a certain astringency from the wood, but it is not excessive, and there is no sign of any PX having been added, it seems totally natural, and one is distracted by the pronounced almond and walnut flavours. Most of the bitterness is balanced out by glycerol, leaving an almost interminable finish. Classic Palo Cortado.

Comments

This wine is very hard to find, but I tasted it at Vinoble in 2014. Both the AD Amontillado VORS and this Palo Cortado have been unavailable for a while but are being re-introduced - in very limited quantities. It is made from the old Pilar Aranda solera, bought with the entire bodega in 1999. Doña Pilar was an almacenista with a fine reputation and this small solera is well over a hundred years old. In 2007 the firm was acquired by Avanteselecta who have continued with Álvaro's dream. The oenologist is Ana Real, and she has done a really good job. Production is only 3,600 bottles. After all, the bodega's slogan is "Maximum quality, minimum quantity".

Price

About 35.00 euros in Spain

Bodegas: Alvaro Domecq

In 1999 Alvaro Domecq Romero bought the oldest surviving (1800) almacenista bodega, that of Pilar Aranda y Latorre. The bodega supplied large quantities of wine to Gonzalez Byass for blending and also supplied Emilio Lustau who bottled the wines unblended for their Almacenista range. He began to put  the wines on the market under the name Alvaro Domecq, the byword being quality. There were initial problems with Allied Domecq's new owners, Pernod Ricard, over the use of the name Domecq, so Pilar Aranda was used for a while, until the problems  were overcome.

Many in the Domecq family thought that "Alvarito" as he was known was mad, after all he was a famous rejoneador (mounted bullfighter) and breeder, but sales slowly grew from fewer than 1,000 cases a month to over 15,000. Now the bodega has a fine reputation. Alvaro always dressed as an English gentleman, wearing tweed and silk ties, like many a Sherry grandee. An outstanding horseman, he was a founder of the Real Escuela Andaluza del Arte Ecuestre and also served as mayor of Jerez.

The bodega, constructed in the early XVIII century and consisting of 5 warehouses, sits in the south of the city on a slight hill and is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the west wind which brings moisture to the flor. The warehouses, are built over 3 levels for the same reason, and unique in Jerez. Nowadays the 2,500sq/m bodega is surrounded by housing in the Barrio San Miguel.

The firm picks the best available young wines from the best bodegas and rears them in an artisanal manner. The oenologist, Ana Real, cares for the 1,500 butts of old wine, and knows every one personally. Such that she found a few exceptional butts of oloroso Alburejo , and we can look forward to a limited VORS release of this. Exports amount to about 60% of sales, particularly in Europe and Latin America, where the name Domecq is well known thanks to their subsidiary in Mexico.

Alvaro passed away in 2005, and in 2007 the investment company Inveravante bought a sizeable stake bringing the firm into a group with other wines from 10 areas such as Rueda and Rioja among others. They also produce very fine brandy and vinegar. There is a shop which sells not only the Alvaro Domecq products, but also those of Inveravante (or Avante Selecta), being wines from all over Spain.

The Domecq name is famous in Jerez and beyond, and Alvaro and the other family members did not want to lose its connection to the wines of Jerez. The date 1730 used on labels relates to the founding of the bodegas which eventually became Pedro Domecq, not that of Pilar Aranda.

Old Vinegar solera, venencias and scales at Alvaro Domecq

The range consists of:

Fino La Janda (over 7 years old)

Manzanilla La Jaca

Oloroso Alburejo (over 7 years old)

Aranda Cream

And the old wines: These have been a bit unreliable in terms of availablity in recent times (there are limited quantities), but efforts have been made to re-introduce the Amontillado and Palo Cortado, as well as the new Oloroso Alburejo:

Oloroso VORS 1730

Palo Cortado VORS 1730

Amontillado VORS 1730

PX VORS 1730

Vinegar:
Some of the finest vinegar in Jerez, the oldest being from 1846!

Address: Calle Madre de Dios S/N, 11401 Jerez de la Frontera, Cadiz

Tel:  (+34) 956 339 634

Web: www.alvarodomecq.com

Visits: yes, with prior arrangement. Various events can be held in the bodegas eg weddings

Bodegas: Pilar Aranda

This famous firm is one of the oldest bodegas in Jerez, and the oldest of the almacenistas. It was established in 1800 by Don Antonio Maria de Aranda y Cardenas, the great grandfather of Pilar Aranda. Don Antonio had four children: Carlos, Felix, Pepa and Fermin. Fermin became a very famous surgeon, and was often invited to speak at medical conferences. At one such in 1924, attended by King Alfonso XIII, he extolled the virtues of Sherry so well that the following day, 1200 of those at the conference visited Jerez! Medical man though he was, he looked after the family bodega and expanded it. He even experimented briefly with growing tobacco. A street was later named after him (the old Calle Medina).

A republican and the owner of vineyards – he came to own four fincas: La Rosa Celeste, La Blanquita, La Huerta de la Marquesa and  La Venta Cantero - and of course the bodegas. He spoke three languages and was known for his charm. He married Dona Pilar Latorre Nieto, and they had four children: Antonio, Fermin, Jose and Pilar, born on the 11th of July 1907.

It was Pilar, widowed young - her husband was killed during the Spanish Civil War - who inherited the bodega containing some 500 butts on her father’s death on the 1^st of May 1946. Along with her sons and the accountancy skills of her cousin Guillermo Ferguson’s stepson, she continued with the winemaking. She was a woman ahead of her time, possessing grace and spontaneity as well as an excellent knowledge of the workings of a bodega, and great skill as a taster. With a great sense of humour and agility of mind, she was well known and respected not only in bodega circles but also in public. 

Pilar had seven bodegas, but three were rented out. The other four contained about 700 butts. She worked a lot with Manuel Maria Gonzalez Gordon of Gonzalez Byass, buying mosto from them and selling them back matured Sherries, in fact 85% of her bodegas output was sold to them for their blends, the rest being sold to Emilio Lustau – such as a lovely Amontillado Fino - to be bottled unblended and sold bearing her name as well as that of Lustau. One treasure in the bodega was an ancient PX, well over 100 years old, which has been aged statically in only four butts, but it is almost impossible to procure any. There is also some outstanding vinegar.

In 1975, at the Harvest Festival, the Consejo Regulador named her “Capataz de Honor” in recognition of her dedication to Sherry. As she grew older, her grandson, Fermin Garcia Villaescusa managed the business. A trained enologist with experience, he is also an artist, and perhaps his greater interest lay there. Dona Pilar passed away in 1997, aged 90, and in 1999 the firm was sold to Alvaro Domecq, a member of that famous bodega family (qv). In 2006 a street in Jerez was renamed in her honour.

It is hard to say whether or not this is a lost bodega, but many changes have certainly been made. The firm now markets the brands based on the existing soleras, but is now part of a big financial group. Lustau is no longer bottling the wines.

Her brands were: 
Fino La Janda
Oloroso Alburejo
Cream Aranda 
These brands have been continued by Alvaro Domecq along with some very old wines which are now  as the 1730 range.

The Women in the Sherry Trade

From an interesting article in the Diario de Jerez

In what has always been a masculine world there have always been women, though never as many as there are now. In the past they were generally inheritors of bodegas when their husbands died, and continued to run them successfully despite the men.

Widows like Teresa Reizo, widow of Francisco Ramon Mendoza of Jerez who inherited in 1817. At about the same time there was the widow of the owner of Victoria e Hijos in El Puerto de Santa Maria. The widow of Richard Sheild; in Sanlucar there was  Josefa Colom, widow of Eduardo Hidalgo; and Aurora Ambrosy Lacave who ran bodegas Pedro Romero between 1911 and 1921.

But there were two outstanding women - Pilar Aranda Latorre and Pilar Pla Pechovierto, both with similar problems and needs. Pilar Aranda was a widow with great strength of character and resourcefulness who decided to take on the traditional formality of the trade to give her sons a future in the family almacenista business starting with the 500 butts of some of the finest and oldest wines in Jerez, which she had inherited from her father Fermin Aranda. The bodega managers cooperated fully, and along with good accounting from her cousin Guillermo Ferguson’s stepson, things went very well and she earned universal respect running the bodega for 50 years till her death in 1997. The wines were bottled and marketed by Emilio Lustau, until the bodega was sold to Alvaro Domecq in 1999.

Pilar Pla Pechovierto “the Sherry Lady” runs the bodega El Maestro Sierra, an all-woman firm along with her daughter Maria del Carmen Borrego Pla and the brilliant enologist Ana Cabestrero Ortega. The bodega began in 1830 when the cooper Jose Antonio Sierra of the Calle Merced filled a bodega with butts which he had made. He died with no heirs and the bodega was inherited by his niece Carmen Casal Soto who, when widowed, set up a company with her children Rosario, Josefa and Antonio to whom she entrusted the production of high quality wines by artisanal means. On Antonio’s death she and her daughters took over the running of the business, and it has prospered ever since. It is now one of the most highly regarded bodegas in Jerez.