Don PX Gran Reserva 1986 75cl

Toro Albalá has been releasing vintage-dated, sweet wines in chronological order for a while (I have great memories of the 1972) and the 'current' release is the 1986 Don PX Gran Reserva, which is a dark, sweet and concentrated dessert wine aged in American oak casks until bottling in June 2014. It has 350 grams of residual sugar. It's extremely dark, motor oil-dense, sweet wine with notes of raisins, hints of flowers, minty with aromas of candied orange peel and herbs, really aromatic and showy. The palate is dense, with the sweetness balanced by good acidity plus spicy and chocolate flavors. 40,000 bottles and 25,000 half bottles produced. The price shown is for a full bottle. Toro Albalá from Montilla-Moriles keeps releasing small lots of very old vintage-dated sweet Pedro Ximénez and this time I also tasted a couple of dry, old, vintage-dated Amontillados of mindboggling quality. Some of the wines reviewed here the last time are also released from new lots, with different lot numbers so the wines might vary slightly as each barrel is different. It looks like the current bottlings were all done at once. With such older wines the vintage date has to be taken with a pinch of salt, as there is little documentation about them and what happened during all these years.