Toro Albala Don PX Seleccion 1980 (750ML)

97 WA

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