97RP Wine Advocate
Drink Date: 2025 2037
The just-bottled 2023 Coche, their grand cru, comes from two or three vineyards in the zone of Mura. It is more austere and cooler, produced like the Redoma Reserva but in specific barrels from specific forest and toast, 30% of them new. It underwent full malolactic and one year of levage in these barrels, stabilized by keeping it four months in stainless steel. It was singing when I tasted it. It has the serious and reductive character that is a constant here, and it is spicy, smoky and flinty, with notes of cold smoke, dry flowers and herbal tea and a dry, serious and chalky mouthfeel. It reminds me of the great 2021, with austerity, contained ripeness and great precision and purity, pungent and long. 10,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in February 2024. Reviewed by: Luis Gutirrez, The Wine Advocate

Winery:
Everything suggests that the origin of Andalusian biological ageing should be dated back to the second half of the eighteenth century, halfway between Sanlcar (providing the wines) and Cdiz (providing the market and commercial channels in the form of the tabancos de montaeses where the beneficial effects of the flor were first appreciated).

Everything likewise indicates that in those days the practice of fortification was infrequent in the white wines destined to local consumption. We gather that from Agustn Fernndezs 1801 article on Vineyard and winemaking practices in San Lucar de Barrameda, published in issue 213 of that admirable source of information that was the Semanario de Agricultura y Artes dirigido a los Prrocos. After stating that the best grapes were the listanes (palomino fino) and the best vineyards those of tierras blancas (albariza soils) he continued as follows:

if the grapes are of top quality, the whites need nothing more; it is true that some add a quarter of refined spirit to stabilize them, but they risk the wines becoming coarse as a result of this (p 59)

If to this we add the fact that the local classification of vineyards according to quality criteria was well settled at the turn of the 18th century, we can infer that the parameters that a top-quality wine of the age had to meet were the following: a) the palomino fino variety, b) sourced from the best vineyards, c) fermented in butt, d) using indigenous yeasts, e) aged under the layer of flor that was formed immediately after the fermentation yeasts finished their job, f) with no added alcohol. This wine, before the generalization of the term vino de manzanilla (for which Cdiz was responsible), was plainly known locally as vino blanco (white wine)