Moving to the sweet wines, which are the specialty of Montilla-Moriles, the 2011 Pedro Ximenez de Cosecha (beware, the vintage is not on the label, is laser printed on the bottle..) is a young, single-vintage, sweet wine produced from partially sun-dried Pedro Ximenez grapes, aiming at preserving the freshness and the fruity character of the grape. It’s only aged for a few months in earthenware amphoras, a traditional aging vessel in the region called tinaja, to avoid the slow oxidation imparted by the wood. Bright orange color, the fragrant nose is redolent of flowers (orange blossom, jasmine), candied orange peel, almost with a Muscat feel to it. The honeyed palate is dense, sweet with some spicy notes and a warm finish. Highly drinkable. Drink 2013-2014.
Perez Barquero was established in 1905 and still have some soleras from that time, the foundational soleras, from which very small quantities of extremely old and concentrated wines are withdrawn and bottled from time to time. In 1985 it was purchased by Rafael Cordoba who owns other three wineries in Montilla, Bodegas Gracia (from which I tasted one wine here), Vinicola del Sur and Tomas Garcia, and the four make up the Perez Barquero Group. They own 100 hectares of vineyards in some of the best locations in the appellation, in Sierra de Montilla and in Moriles Alto, planted with a majority of Pedro Ximenez, and control a further 400 hectares of vineyards belonging to other grape growers. With this they produce an impressive array of both dry and sweet wines (plus brandy and vinegar), whose main characteristic is balance, elegance and finesse. They stock 10,000 500- to 600-liter American oak barrels, the famous botas where they age their wines following the soleras and criaderas system. They produce an average of three million bottles of wine per year. Perez Barquero represents the quality summit of Montilla-Moriles. Their Finos usually have a lot number, whose first two digits seem to be the bottling year. All the Finos tasted had a lot starting with 13. The oldest wines, the ones labeled 1905, which is the year their soleras were created, were only bottled once in 2002, around 1,000 bottles of each, so the bottles should be decanted in advance to give the wines the chance to breath.
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