A Spanish Arrival

A Cask of Amontillado. Well, not a cask, but three small bottles. Del Duque true Amontillado from the Gonzalez Byass winery. 375ml half-bottles at $20 per.

This is one of the finest of Spanish sherries. Most of what is called "Amontillado" is simply a term for blended medium sherry, and is no more expensive than any other ordinary sherry. True Amontillado occurs when a fino sherry is allowed to age naturally until the layer of yeasts that grows on fino in the cask no longer occurs, and the wine takes on a honey color from the oak of the cask and long ageing. It's more complicated that that, in truth, but that is a good starting description of Amontillado.

The stuff is extremely aromatic, and is dry. If your only experience of sherry is via Harvey's Bristol Cream, be aware that those dessert sherries are only one single type of sherry; sherries range from extremely sweet to extremely dry, and some of them are among the driest of all wines.

You can spend as much time smelling this fine wine as you can drinking it, if you like. The professional tasters in the bodegas where sherry is made are so discriminating that they can tell the quality of the wine simply by smelling it, in many cases. It's 21.5 percent alcohol, which works out to 43 proof, so a few glasses are all that is needed for a lift.

Here's a pic I took:



If you want some and aren't living around Charlotte to arrange a visit, you can buy it at Witty's Wine, the web address hilariously looks like "witty swine" when you look at it casually.