Toro Albala Don PX  1946 Convento Selección

1980 Selección

 

Up to 100 pts The Wine Advocate

 

 

 

Although the big scores from The Wine Advocate are impressive, our customers who have had the opportunity to drink this superb wine have nothing but great things to say about it. My personal experience is that they have incredible depth and a true kaleidoscope of flavors. The magical wines of Toro Albala are nothing short of stunning in their complexity and aromatics. 

 

"I visited Toro Albalá in their winery in Aguilar de la Frontera in Córdoba. They are famous by the extremely old, complex, sweet and concentrated Pedro Ximénez. I tasted a whole range of wines that are available in 2016, including an incredible 1931. The winery is full of old artifacts, roman stones and God knows what; they have a museum with an incredible collection of old wine books containing some 3,000 volumes. I also tasted a very old Amontillado they might bottle in limited quantities and a PX from around 1950 that showed a similar character to the famous 1946." The Wine Advocate-Luiz Gutierrez  

 

In the early 1970's there was a name change for the wine whereby the Convento nomenclature was dropped and only used for the extremely old bottlings.   

 

1946 Toro Albala Don PX Convento Selección

100 pts The Wine Advocate

$247.89/bottle (pre-arrival) Buy Now

 

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 its amazing that you can still buy and drink something so old, and Im 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.

 

1980 Toro Albala Don PX Selección

97 pts The Wine Advocate

$175.89/bottle (pre-arrival) Buy Now

 

The 1980 Don PX Selección is said to come from a warm and dry year that favored the raisining of the Pedro Ximénez grapes. This has lots of candied fruit and spice and combines the 17% alcohol with a whopping 340 grams of residual sugar. This aged in American oak butts until its bottling in September 2018. It surprised me with a complex and somewhat savory nose, reminiscent of bitter chocolate, licorice and roasted coffee, carob beans and black pepper. It's super concentrated, dense and pungent, with a savory component, meaning the sugar is not as noticeable as you might think. It came through as complex and layered, very complete and intense. There are 4,600 bottles and 60 magnums of this.

 

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, its 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. Luis Gutierrez

 

See other Toro Albala wines soon to arrive > 

 

 

 

 

Sincerely,

Ron van Vlaardingen  
Fine Wine Sales Director

Grand Vin Wine Merchants

1003 4th Avenue E  | Olympia, WA  98506 | Office: 360.350.4896 x 2

www.grandvinwinemerchants.com | ron@grandvinwinemerchants.com 

 
 
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Grand Vin Wine Merchants · 1003 4th Ave East · Olympia, Washington 98506 · United States (360) 350-4896