2022 Vino de Pasto Macharnudo
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Made from grapes grown on some of the finest Albariza soil in Jerez, this still dry white wine is extraordinarily refined. It has a very pure, mineral, quartz-like aromatic quality with a beautifully elegant, streamlined palate packed with salinity and lemon oil notes. There is such lightness and lift to the palate, yet there is amazing depth and a very long finish. Aged for one year under flor, you only pick up a hint of those aromatics, but it helps build the most beautiful texture on the palate. It is sublime.
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This wine should confirm the deepest revolution in Jerez. It is a wine singing a particular terroir, while allowing the flor (the second slow fermentation in the barrels that provides more freshness and those wonderful almondy aromas), to play a virtuoso second fiddle. A flamenco singer with a master guitar. Refined but intense in nose, complex, with intriguing salty and bready aromas, dry nuts and a chalky je ne sais pas. Fresh and silky in mouth, never powerful but always precise and assertive, so long so elegantly lean. One can love it or not, but nobody can deny its uniqueness.
The 2022 Macharnudo San Cayetano Vino de Pasto is an unfortified Palomino from Sherry soils, from the famous Macharnudo vineyard in Jerez. The grapes were sun dried for a few hours, and the wine has less biological influence and more limestone influence despite having aged under a veil of flor yeasts; it comes from a plot of more concentration than the regular Macharnudo. 2022 was already an intense vintage; they wanted to avoid the wine being too heavy, and the wine shows superb. The La Escribana also comes from the Macharnudo vineyard, but this wine comes from a different plot in Macharnudo, an adjacent plot of very old vines (older than the others), looking for finesse and definition in the palate. It is more of a white wine than a flor wine. It was a dry year, and despite everything, the wine finished with a moderate 13.5% alcohol. The regular Macharnudo they had produced since 2016 will now include the name of the plot, El Notario, to distinguish it from these new bottlings. This 2022 has a powdery, chalky mouthfeel, very much the expression of the albariza calcareous soils. It doesn't have high acidity but has very good freshness and balance and a tasty minerality that makes you salivate; it's super tasty. This should bloom with a couple of years in bottle. There are some 6,000 bottles. It was bottled in July 2023. This is not in the Jerez/Sherry appellation, but there's an initiative to create a separate appellation of origin for these unfortified white wines.