Thursday 15 September 2016

Pedro Ximénez Añada 2014 12%, Ximénez Spínola

Appearance
Deep transparent coppery amber fading to amber at the rim with slow viscous legs.
Nose
Lots of caramel toffee and a slight butter note with attractive notes of raisin as it smells at the press - it is so natural you can smell the skins and stalks and even their texture. For a young wine at only 12% the nose is quite intense and has no distracting oak aromas, leaving the pure essence of  PX .
Palate
Rich, sweet and unctuous, very soft for a while till a certain level of acidity comes through. Softly chewy in texture with lots of creamy caramel and toffee, banoffee without the banana, very substantial yet remarkably elegant with considerable length. Young and fresh.
Comments
This is a special wine; the only vintage PX (except for Ramiro Ibáñez' Pandorga). It is made from their own 16 hectares of vineyard by a different process from standard PX which involves leaving the ripe grapes on the vine for three weeks after the normal harvest to develop more sugar and lose some water. The yield is inevitably tiny, and only some 200 litres of gently pressed must are produced from a ton of grapes. The super-ripe grapes are then hand picked and fermented in barrel on the skins for maximum extraction of flavour. After fermentation the wine is aged on its lees for four months with regular batonnage (lees stirring) to extract even more flavour, and gently filtered into bottle. No fortification spirit is added. The bottle is sealed with a cylindrical Diam cork. While the wine is superb, its method of production doesn't comply with the Reglamento, so it does not carry a DO Sherry precinta, but hopefully one day it will. This was bottle 03534 from a total of 11275 produced.
Price
About 20 euros per half bottle


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