Alvear Pedro Ximenez de Anada (375ML half-bottle) 2017
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Alvear Pedro Ximénez de Añada is a vintage dated sweet wine from the estate’s Pedro Ximénez vineyards. The grapes are harvested at typical levels of ripeness, and dried in the blazing Montilla sun on mats in the vineyards. The wine is vinified in open clay amphora, and fortified to halt the fermentation.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
All Pedro Ximenex that was sundried and pressed into amphora, the 2017 Pedro Ximenez De Añada reveals a deep amber/honey color as well as beautiful notes of caramelized peach, candied orange, medicinal herbs, honeycomb, and fig. Uber-rich, full-bodied, and unctuous, it stays reasonably balanced given this much sweetness and opulence and has incredible length. This is a terrific dessert wine to pair with fruit dessert.
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James Suckling
What a beautiful sweet wine with toffee, apple tart, caramel and hints of citrus. Thick and sweet, but so delicious and lively. Really clear and vibrant fruit at the end.
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Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
Montilla-Moriles is a DO wine zone in Andalucia, in southern Spain, just south of Córdoba city but inland from the coast. Historically the wines of Montilla-Moriles made their way into the sherries made in Jerez. But once it was awarded DO status in 1945, Montilla-Moriles began to establish its own identity. The chalky and sandy soils combined with extremely hot temperatures are best to produce Pedro Ximénez, which accounts for nearly three quarters of the region’s production, some of which is still legally sold to Jerez and Málaga producers. The unique conditions of Montilla-Moriles allow for Pedro Ximénez to be bottled also in the Vinos Dulces Naturales (naturally sweet) style, a non-fortified style for which the region is recognized.
Muscat and Lairén are also produced for blending. Palomino is not suited to the extreme conditions of the area.
The basic types of Montilla-Moriles DO wines include young fruity wines, aged (crianza) wines, and generosos, which are aged in a solera system similar to those in Jerez. The resulting styles of generosos, simply known as, Montilla, while similar to sherry, perhaps display a bit less finesse given they are aged away from the cooling effects of the Atlantic.