The youngest I've tried from this brand name is the 1970 Don PX Convento Selección, the only one I tasted this time that fit into the classical canon, dense and serious with textbook aromas of carob beans, dark chocolate, tar and coffee and a relatively fresh palate with not so much alcohol and integrated sweetness considering it's supposed to have 510 grams of residual sugar. This is not yet bottle either, but they expect to produce some 14,000 bottles.

My favorite of all the old sweet PXs I tasted this time was the perfumed and showy 1964 Don PX Convento Selección, which still has the wooden label, but it has also been modernized and made easier to read. It is denser than any of the other wines and has a brighter edge, amber, because the center is opaque and black. It has an incredible perfume; it's floral and spicy with fresher aromas than I remember in the other sweet PXs. It fills your mouth, goes down your throat like liquid gold and explodes in the eternal finish. It's an amazing PX with 15.5% alcohol, lower that most, and with 377 grams of sugar, also lower than most. Elegant and intense, simply delicious. There are 4,630 bottles of this wine, all bottled in February 2022.

The oldest of the sweet wines I tried this time was the 1958 Don PX Convento Selección, a very complex and nuanced wine with notes of charred wood, tar, coal, bitter dark chocolate, licorice, roasted coffee beans and aromatic herbs. The palate is compact with no fissures and a bitterness that compensates the sweetness (it has 350 grams of sugar, so it's not a surprise that it doesn't feel as sweet as others). It's relatively dense, complex, rare and unique. They expect to produce 14,200 bottles of this elixir.

One more single-harvest, old sweet wine, the 1955 Don PX Convento Selección was bottled in September 2014 and it had been aged slowly in very old American oak barrels and getting thick and concentrated through evaporation. It's 320 grams of sugar are (partially) compensated by 6.5 grams of acidity. It has a nose and palate of chocolate-covered candied orange, spices, molasses. I'd say the dominant aromas in the nose are dark chocolate. It's very dense, developing notes of very concentrated licorice and balsamic, mint, camphor and evolving notes of petrol with time. Complex, rare and unique. 8,400 bottles.

The 1946 Don PX Convento Seleccion produced with Pedro Ximenez grapes dehydrated under the sun at the time of the Second World War, was only bottled in September 2011. This is an extreme wine, my first descriptor was ultra-mega-super concentrated. It is unbelievably powerful, both in the nose and the palate, full of umami, with sweet cinnamon, Christmas cake, camphor, petrol, lemongrass, Belgian chocolate and butter. Incredibly complex and rich, sweet, balanced and smooth in the palate, it is both very sweet and somehow salty, and with time it develops a black olive note. It combines the texture of the 1962 and the elegance of the 1949. It is as decadent as it gets. 825 bottles were produced. This wine will survive all of us. These wines are kept for generations and offered in very small quantities, but it’s amazing that you can still buy and drink something so old, and I’m even tempted to say that it might represent good value for what it is. A real tour de force sweet wine. Drink it if you ever have the privilege to do so from 2013-2060. This is a peculiar winery, a little eccentric and unusual, a family affair created in 1922 although their roots can be traced back to the 19th century. The core of the winery is located inside an old electricity plant in Aguilar de la Frontera, south of Cordoba, in the heart of the Montilla-Moriles appellation and directed by collector, inventor and entrepreneur Antonio Sanchez. They sell 650,000 liters of wine per year, of which 40% is exported and sold in 27 different countries. They are growing in the US, the UK, Australia, and also with increasing interest in Asia, “mainly for the sweet wines,” Antonio Sorgato, the export manager of the firm, tells me. “We are selling sweet wines, but Fino, it’s much more difficult.” This is not something unique to them, as the whole Montilla-Moriles is better known for its sweet, dark, unctuous Pedro Ximenez wines. All the wines they produce are of course fermented from Pedro Ximenez white grapes, but for the sweet wines the grapes are sun-dried, dehydrated into raisins, and the resulting wine is brown in color which gets darker as the wine ages and concentrates in barrel. The oldest examples are an opaque black with an amber rim as dense as motor oil. They have a most impressive collection of single vintage PX wines going back to the time of the Second World War. Imported by Classical Wines, Ltd, Seattle WA; tel. (206) 297-6713