One of the best white wines I have drunk in my life has to be the 1919 Castillo Ygay Blanco Gran Reserva Especial, a Rioja white almost 100 years old—an age you can expect in Port or Madeira, but not many unfortified wines, and even less so with white wines. There are no records whatsoever about this wine, not even its market release, but the 1917 was sold in 1948. The bottle I tasted had been recorked in 1957. Words are not enough to describe wines like this one. It has all of the complexity, depth, nuances and aromas of all the other vintages distilled into a perfect bottle. The winery does not have more than a dozen bottles of this nearly centenary wine and they were kind enough to open one for me. There was no wine leftover to analyze after the tasting, so the mystery remains about this amazing wine, but it has to be consistent with the others, as the tasting confirmed moderate alcohol, low pH and relatively high acidity with a healthy dose of sulfur that has kept the wine very alive. The wine evolved in the glass over the course of four or five hours, developing nuances and getting sharper and more focused, but never showing any signs of fatigue or oxidation. Antiquary shop, hazelnuts, quince paste, bitter orange marmalade, mushrooms, rusty iron, baked cakes, white pepper, chocolate, Mediterranean herbs... There were no signs of fatigue and these whites, with their long oxidative ageing in barrel, are extremely stable; they even improve from one day to the next when a bottle is opened. Within the perfection of various vintages, when numeric scales fail to reflect what these wines really are, this would be my hypothetical favorite.
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