Description
Pedro Ximenez (PX) in the world today with the finest vineyards in Montilla (the region for Pedro!) in Spain.
Toro Albalá reserve select lots of their best vintage wines for the Gran Reserva label. These unusually rich Pedro Ximénez wines are destined for a very long aging in oak barrels. After filling and sealing, these barrels are left for decades in their single-vintage state. It’s during this slow maturation that the wines undertake their delicious, savoury, rancio transformation (though controlled exposure to oxygen) which brings a kind of nutty, iodine character that infinitely complexes the wine but also gives it added freshness. Naturally as the wines concentrate in flavour and texture the colour darkens and mouth-feel develops accordingly. After a minimum of 25 years in barrel, vintages are selected for release only when they have attained these classic hallmarks of aged P.X. This 1983 has the same lustrous, black mahogany colour of the popular 1985. The nose is sweetly radiant, saturated with all kinds of evocative smoke, raisin, and savoury aromas; blond tobacco, liquorice and even rosemary. The palate is chock full of dark chocolate, roasted coffee beans, smoke and rum lace, fruitcake flavours yet there is a wonderful, bitter-sweet tang of Turkish coffee and fresh acidity that hems in the wines shape and freshness. One sip of this and you will understand why Toro Albala is one of the highest-regarded producers of sweet wines in Spain!
This is extraordinary nectar…. This wine will last for months after opening if you somehow can resist finishing it in one sitting!)
92 points, Luis Gutierrez, eRobertParker.com #216 … “Toro Albalá has been releasing vintage-dated, sweet wines in chronological order for a while (I have great memories of the 1972) and the ‘current’ release is the 1986 Don PX Gran Reserva, which is a dark, sweet and concentrated dessert wine aged in American oak casks until bottling in June 2014. It has 350 grams of residual sugar. It’s extremely dark, motor oil-dense, sweet wine with notes of raisins, hints of flowers, minty with aromas of candied orange peel and herbs, really aromatic and showy. The palate is dense, with the sweetness balanced by good acidity plus spicy and chocolate flavors.”
RRP $62