I also tasted the young and unoaked sweet 2016 Pedro Ximénez de Cosecha produced with sun-dried Pedro Ximénez grapes fortified to 15% alcohol, retaining 428 grams of residual sugar. It has aromas of raisins and dried apricots with a minty touch. The palate is very, very sweet and syrupy, like liquid honey. One to be sipped in very small doses. 2,000 500-milliliter bottles were filled in June 2017.

The young and unoaked sweet wine, the 2014 Pedro Ximénez de Cosecha produced with raisined PX grapes that have been sun dried, now has the vintage clearly visible on the back label. The idea here is to offer a lighter and young style in a clear bottle (similar to the ones from Tokaj) to show the color and express the pure fruit. It does have a powerful nose of raisins and a very sweet palate with its 15% alcohol and 430 grams of sugar. It would have been okay, if I hadn't tasted the base wine for the 2015 harvest next to it, when it was fortified to only 8.8% alcohol, the first blending of the must with alcohol, which is later fortified to 12% and later to 15% - which is the required alcohol level to be able to sell the wine. Clearly 15% is too alcoholic and it all depends on the quality of the alcohol you use; while the base wine was truly the essence of raisins (raisin marmalade if that's possible!), here the alcohol is too evident. I don't really see the logic or the need to fortify these wines to 15%. Anyway, the 2014 is fine as a young, sweet luscious PX do drink chilled in its exuberant youth. 18,000 50-centiliter bottles were produced and the price given is therefore for a half-liter.

Moving to the sweet wines, which are the specialty of Montilla-Moriles, the 2011 Pedro Ximenez de Cosecha (beware, the vintage is not on the label, is laser printed on the bottle..) is a young, single-vintage, sweet wine produced from partially sun-dried Pedro Ximenez grapes, aiming at preserving the freshness and the fruity character of the grape. It’s only aged for a few months in earthenware amphoras, a traditional aging vessel in the region called tinaja, to avoid the slow oxidation imparted by the wood. Bright orange color, the fragrant nose is redolent of flowers (orange blossom, jasmine), candied orange peel, almost with a Muscat feel to it. The honeyed palate is dense, sweet with some spicy notes and a warm finish. Highly drinkable. Drink 2013-2014. Perez Barquero was established in 1905 and still have some soleras from that time, the foundational soleras, from which very small quantities of extremely old and concentrated wines are withdrawn and bottled from time to time. In 1985 it was purchased by Rafael Cordoba who owns other three wineries in Montilla, Bodegas Gracia (from which I tasted one wine here), Vinicola del Sur and Tomas Garcia, and the four make up the Perez Barquero Group. They own 100 hectares of vineyards in some of the best locations in the appellation, in Sierra de Montilla and in Moriles Alto, planted with a majority of Pedro Ximenez, and control a further 400 hectares of vineyards belonging to other grape growers. With this they produce an impressive array of both dry and sweet wines (plus brandy and vinegar), whose main characteristic is balance, elegance and finesse. They stock 10,000 500- to 600-liter American oak barrels, the famous botas where they age their wines following the soleras and criaderas system. They produce an average of three million bottles of wine per year. Perez Barquero represents the quality summit of Montilla-Moriles. Their Finos usually have a lot number, whose first two digits seem to be the bottling year. All the Finos tasted had a lot starting with 13. The oldest wines, the ones labeled 1905, which is the year their soleras were created, were only bottled once in 2002, around 1,000 bottles of each, so the bottles should be decanted in advance to give the wines the chance to breath. Imported by A. Hardy’s USA, www.ahardyusa.com