Clean and bright with the attractive color of old gold. Deliciously intense and dry yet elegant. Full complex aromas including hints of dried orange peel and almonds. Mouth-filling and bone dry on the palate, incredibly long and enveloping. This elegant wine has maintained all its finesse and subtle hint of salinity from its distant biological ageing as a Manzanilla.
Wine can be a synthesis of some essential elements, one of which is time: More time, more history , greater quality. Some wines transcend the natural age of man. These Sherries have undergone century long ageing in Barbadillo’s old cellars, or ‘bodegas’, in silence, almost forgotten, and have evolved in to these vinous jewels, the Reliquias.
The Reliquia Amontillado originates from Barbadillo’s ‘Pedro Rodriguez winery in the 1870’s.
In the 1920s it was blended with ‘Soberana’ Amontillado and another old Amontillado called ‘Hindenburg’ acquired from the cellars of the Count of Aldana in the 1890s by Don Antonio Barbadillo who exchanged 10 butts of Manzanilla for each old cask of the Hindenburg.
Wine Advocate Review:
There is a new saca in a new bottle format of the otherworldly NV Reliquia Amontillado, now bottled in half bottles, with a different handmade label every year (and even the back labels are personalized with the bottle number and the name of the distributors and importers, as the wines are assigned by allocation to them). The wines are very similar, stable and sustainable as long as they keep from the temptation to bottle more; they are taken in minute quantities from the barrels to maintain the extremely old average age. This has infinite concentration. Only 80 half bottles are filled each October and hit the market around Christmas. The price is for a 375-milliliter bottle. Anticipated Maturity: 2021-2038