Barbadillo is a historic bodega in Sanlucar de Barrameda, in Spain’s southern Andalucia region. With 500 hectares of vines, Barbadillo is a sizeable player. A raffish coastal town of immense charm, Sanlucar is the home of the Manzanilla idiom of sherry – an anglicized term drawn from the nomenclature of the larger town of Jerez, slightly inland.
While Jerez is all about the fino style, Manzanilla is unique to Sanlucar due to its saline maritime air, a vector as much as a protector of the indigenous surface yeast known as flor. It is the flor that sucks up the sugar to confer Manzanilla’s unique bony structure, while imparting riffs on camomile, cheese cloth, gardenia and orange bitters.
In the case of the Barbadillo Solear Saca de Verano Estacional 2023, though, we are speaking of an “en rama” expression – unfiltered wines that Barbadillo revolutionized back in 1999 when they made the very first. For each “saca,” or bottling, only around 2,000 bottles are produced, with one saca created for each season.
After “running the scales” of a short criadera (the stacked barrels whence fractions are blended), the wine is bottled from the lower rung of barrels, or solera. The wine is then given a whiff of oxygen to create a Manzanilla pasada – a gently oxidative style. The oxygen adds further complexity, akin to almond meal and walnut husk, evincing a piquant exclamation to the endless finish. This is an extremely rare wine. No wonder, then, that I tasted it at the Sherry Club, in the Tokyo neighborhood of Ginza (only 48 bottles of the wine made it to Japan). The Sherry Club offers the greatest number of sherries, both by-the-glass and bottle, of anywhere in the world.
– Ned Goodwin MW
