Winemaker Notes
Select lots of Pedro Ximénez (PX) are destined for oak botas, which are subsequently kept topped up with wine from the same vintage. After a minimum of 25 years and a dramatic loss to evaporation, vintages are selected for bottling only upon having attained classic vintage character: opaque, black mahogany color with a notably bitter and balanced complexity.
Professional Ratings
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Decanter
Wow! Dried grapes are fermented as far as possible (this has 387g/litre of residual sugar) then lightly fortified and freshened up with some Amontillado before ageing for 28 years in old US oak butts. Complex, rich walnuts, spiced rye, dried fruit, iodine, coffee, liquorice and treacle. Try with dark chocolate or pour over ice cream.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 1990 Don PX Gran Reserva has unusually high sugar, close to 400 grams (when this range is usually less than 360). Compared with the rest of wines, this feels like a very good value. These wines mature in old 550-liter American oak casks for decades, and the wines have great concentration. It felt unusually perfumed, a little spirity and with notes that made me think of Moscatel—notes of orange peel and flowers, and of course the raisin and dry dates and figs from these wines made with raisins. It's sweet and dense like motor oil and leaves a combination of raisins and chocolate in the spicy and faintly warm finish. This was bottled in early 2019.
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Wine Enthusiast
Licorice, maple, fig and exotic rooty aromas give this a nose similar to an Italian Amaro. A thick palate is a bit sticky, while this tastes of rooty spices, aged wood and chocolate. Amaro-like bitterness and rooty sweetness share the finish on this aged P.X., with heat and mild burn.
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
Montilla-Moriles is a DO wine zone in Andalucia, in southern Spain, just south of Córdoba city but inland from the coast. Historically the wines of Montilla-Moriles made their way into the sherries made in Jerez. But once it was awarded DO status in 1945, Montilla-Moriles began to establish its own identity. The chalky and sandy soils combined with extremely hot temperatures are best to produce Pedro Ximénez, which accounts for nearly three quarters of the region’s production, some of which is still legally sold to Jerez and Málaga producers. The unique conditions of Montilla-Moriles allow for Pedro Ximénez to be bottled also in the Vinos Dulces Naturales (naturally sweet) style, a non-fortified style for which the region is recognized.
Muscat and Lairén are also produced for blending. Palomino is not suited to the extreme conditions of the area.
The basic types of Montilla-Moriles DO wines include young fruity wines, aged (crianza) wines, and generosos, which are aged in a solera system similar to those in Jerez. The resulting styles of generosos, simply known as, Montilla, while similar to sherry, perhaps display a bit less finesse given they are aged away from the cooling effects of the Atlantic.