1962 Don PX Reserva Especial

The 1962 Don PX Reserva Especial is pitch black, dense as (used) motor oil, medicinal and balsamic, with a grassy nose of licorice, black olives, roasted coffee, smoke and ash, very intense and expressive in the palate, spicy (nutmeg) with incredible length, perhaps not as integrated as the 49 and 46. These wines have to be tasted to be believed. It was bottled after 49 years aging in bota. Drink 2013-2040. ||This is a peculiar winery, a little eccentric and unusual, a family affair created in 1922 although their roots can be traced back to the 19th century. The core of the winery is located inside an old electricity plant in Aguilar de la Frontera, south of Cordoba, in the heart of the Montilla-Moriles appellation and directed by collector, inventor and entrepreneur Antonio Sanchez. They sell 650,000 liters of wine per year, of which 40% is exported and sold in 27 different countries. They are growing in the US, the UK, Australia, and also with increasing interest in Asia, “mainly for the sweet wines,” Antonio Sorgato, the export manager of the firm, tells me. “We are selling sweet wines, but Fino, it’s much more difficult.” This is not something unique to them, as the whole Montilla-Moriles is better known for its sweet, dark, unctuous Pedro Ximenez wines. All the wines they produce are of course fermented from Pedro Ximenez white grapes, but for the sweet wines the grapes are sun-dried, dehydrated into raisins, and the resulting wine is brown in color which gets darker as the wine ages and concentrates in barrel. The oldest examples are an opaque black with an amber rim as dense as motor oil. They have a most impressive collection of single vintage PX wines going back to the time of the Second World War.||Imported by Classical Wines, Ltd, Seattle WA; tel. (206) 297-6713 Wine Advocate.August, 2013