Solera Amontillado 1905 75cl

The NV 1905 Amontillado Solera Fundacional Lot B 2016 is a limited release of their oldest Amontillado, taken from the soleras that were started the year the winery was created in 1905; but it is not a pure vintage wine from that year, instead it is a blend of great complexity of multiple vintages aged in a dynamic soleras and criaderas system. I explain this here, because having the date as part of the wine name or brand name creates great confusion, and you should be aware of the differences between a 1905 vintage wine and a 1905 solera wine. A solera wine can be older or younger depending how much wine is taken out each year, and the average age of the wine is according to that. Here, they bottled some 1,000 bottles ten years ago from a total of seven 600-liter barrels, and the quantity was replaced with wine from the 31 butts (casks) of very old wine that was selected as the 'criadera' for the solera. So the average age is kept very high, and the bottled wine that is offered now is thought to be 80- to 90-years-old on average.  In any case, this small refreshing of the wine ten years ago (the bottled wine had to be replaced with slightly younger wine from the older criaderas) seems to have done it good, and ironically though a little 'younger' than the previous bottling, it seems more balanced and elegant - especially as it has had plenty of time, some ten years, to blend in the newer wine. The result is astonishing. The nose combines the obvious very old wine characteristics of rusty iron, iodine, varnish, incense and oyster shells with fresher hazelnuts, noble varnished woods and a touch of white pepper. The palate is intense, terribly complex and persistent, but with gobsmacking balance and elegance, while being powerful and very concentrated. Here, time concentrates everything - alcohol, acidity and sugar, but the wine manages to keep good balance in a sort of 'a lot of everything'. I cannot see how to improve this wine (other than perhaps the packaging). This should be virtually indestructible, as it has been slowly oxidized for close to a century, so nothing is going to harm it now. 1,000 bottles were filled in January 2016.  I finally visited Pérez Barquero and some of their vineyards in Moriles Alto and the Sierra de Montilla mountains, where they own some 100 hectares of vineyards. We had an (almost running) tour of some of their vineyards, bodegas and soleras; in the end I decided their old wines deserved more time and attention, so I tasted them at home over the course of various days.  My visit was very pertinent and just in time, as they are releasing their limited production Solera Fundacional some ten years after the first bottling, and also a new bottling of four old wines. This traditional house produces superb wines that usually represent very good value, too, and tend to fly under the radar, perhaps because of their old style image of bottles and labels. The older wines seem even better balanced and more elegant than the original release (which is differentiated by just a B on the left bottom corner of the labels, as the original release was named A). Pérez Barquero is one of the greatest and most consistent wineries in the whole of Andalucía and they deserve a much higher recognition for their great wines.