NV Reliquia Oloroso Seco

Winemaker Montse Molina says, 'This one is really, really special. It is the oldest of the Reliquias and the most difficult to understand. People ask me, "Montse, I don't get this wine. Tell me what it means." Wines like this are not made to be comfortable.' There are seven barrels in the solera and the acidity is 15 g/l. Dark brown, tinge of green on the rim, a rose-red glow in the soft light of our study. Smells like glue. You can smell the bitterness. It is all the dry, earthy, bitter herbs shimmering in the air between the glass and me: black cardamom, wormwood, cinnamon bark, nutmeg, cumin, pine, anise, juniper. I can smell the cool silence of old stone chapels, the cold dust of magnificent, echoing cathedrals. I can smell dates, roasted buckwheat, museum storehouses, a kitchen that has been unused for years. I can smell rain-soaked campfire embers and wet cedar and rich compost and molasses bread. I then I put it in my mouth and freeze. If the Amontillado and Palo Cortado shocked me, this made me almost panic. So much salt, so much acidity, so much bitterness, so much complexity that I suddenly thought: I'm not up to this task. This wine makes me feel like a speck. The very meaning of concentration. It's as if the wine has extracted the heart of the oak tree, extracted the soil it grew in, extracted every storm it bent its branches into, extracted every mote of dust in the bodega, extracted the souls and soles of the people who walked past it every day, who tended it. It's the poetry of time in the ink of wine. This is not just history in a glass, this is a story of time. And like history, it's not a romance. It has brutality and an incomprehensible beauty. (TC)