NV Amontillado VORS 0,75l Bodegas Tradicion
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Tasting notes
There's a new and restricted bottle of 200 half bottles filled in 2024 of the NV Amontillado Viejísimo Tradición, which they now estimate to be around 100 years of average age. It has a very dark amber color and a super pungent nose, reflecting very old age and extreme concentration (it's marked 22% alcohol on the label). It has notes of smoked almonds, peat, iodine—think Talisker whisky—old woods, wax and varnish and even a touch of extravecchio balsamic vinegar. It's pungent and liqueur-like, sharp and incisive, with marked salinity and bitterness and a bone-dry finish, with notes of salty soy sauce and Bovril. It's an extreme wine, not for all palates and difficult to combine with food, as it'd overwhelm most dishes. it would be difficult to classify it in a style other than "very old wine." 200 hand-numbered half bottles produced. It was bottled in May 2024.
Critic scores
Jancis Robinson MW
Richard Hemming MW, jancisrobinson.com
More reviews and scores
I tasted again the stunning 1/24 lot of the NV Amontillado VORS from July 2024 (handwritten on the label after the bottle number, 2302/2400 in this case). It is a wine of exceptional complexity and elegance, true to the style, combining a biological and oxidative phase of aging, which gives it the best of both worlds. It's subtle and elegant, with great balance, incredible for the old age and the concentration that has given it 21% alcohol and 9.94 grams of acidity that lift it up. It has a powerful nose of iodine, low tide and iron rust. It's nutty, volatile, saline and complex, very powerful and pungent, with a very long aftertaste. 2,400 hand-numbered bottles were filled in July 2024.
Takes intensity to new level. Almost smoky , with grilled nuts, almond butter, ginger chocolate. Still has a citric edge. Dry. Green tobacco leaf – there’s still some of the freshness of fino. Moves to dried wild herbs, then mixed toasted nuts on an immensely long finish. Vibrant. (DB)
Full bottle 1,189 g. From a solera with an average age of 45 years old. According to J&B, this will stay fresh and good for months after it's been opened if the cork is put back tightly. The first aroma out the glass is rum-and-raisin ice cream, then spice-cookie dough, ginger nuts, Jamaican ginger cake. It's smoky deep and deeply tangy. There is charred quince and orange peel and salted mandarin and pickled lemon and roasted pecans and walnut skin. It's heavy silk and fireside copper gleam and throat-warming and throaty. It is so vividly alive that the energy of it makes my fingertips tingle. Breath-taking. VGV (TC)