Spain

92 Points! A very attractive, medium-bodied Amontillado with a slew of dried fruit and a delicate hint of toffee. Elegant and dry with just a hint of bitterness that the rich flavors balance very nicely. Very clean finish. - JamesSuckling.com

94 Points! Lots of prunes, figs and black dates here with dried persimmon, saffron, walnut, old books and caramel. This is bone-dry and tangy with lots of walnut on the palate. Intense, balanced and long with a nutty finish. Drink now. - JamesSuckling.com

Caberrubia is an unfortified and ancestral style of Sherry that once was commonplace in Jerez. Caberrubia is harvested in early September, dried for 6-7 hours, then crushed by foot in lagars. The wine is then racked into botas, where indigenous yeast begins the fermentation. After fermentation, the wines with the most “Fino” character are racked into barrels leaving only a small space at top for the development of flor. Each year a selection of the most suitable casks is made to release a NV wine that expresses the fruit concentration and salinity characteristic of Carrascal.

La Escribana is a vino de pasto from the Pérez family’s holdings in the famed Macharnudo vineyard (La Escribana & San Cayetano). After a green harvest in early August to reduce production and provide a small amount of “green wine” for distillation or adjusting the acidity of the final wine, La Escribana is picked in late August and pressed into stainless-steel tanks for fermentation. It sees a year of biologic aging in 80-year-old botas before bottling.

From the importer: Barrialto Sobre Lías Santa Brigida, bottled from a single 500L butt, is a blend of two different albariza soil sub-types. Palomino grapes from Pago Balbaína Baja near Jerez (albariza tosca cerrada soils), with grapes from Pago Maína, near Sanlúcar, (albariza barajuelas soil). Rafa says that the tosca cerrada albrariza lends the blend balance and fitness, while the barrajuela albariza lends a dry minerality and herbal salinity. Each wine Rafa produces is a unique snapshot of a place, time, and soil type in his vineyards in the Jerez region. As a result, production of these authentic treasures is in the hundreds of bottles, and they are exceptionally limited, coming to the US market in tiny allocations.

Hand-harvested palomino grapes (from 40+ year-old vines) are de-stemmed and pressed, followed by spontaneous fermentation with native yeasts from the vineyard without temperature control in a 500L ex-Manzanilla cask. After fermentation, it rests for nine months on its fine lees with bâtonnage in the same barrels before being racked into a stainless steel tank to settle before bottling unfined, with only a light paper filtration and minimal additional sulfur used before bottling.

The NV Fino Jarana, aged in Jerez, has a beautiful, classical Fino nose of chalk, dry hay, dry straw (esparto) and nuts, while the palate is very dry, intense and pungent, long, with a pleasant bitter finish. It’s both intense and fine.- Luis Gutierrez, robertparker.com