La Bota de Manzanilla Pasada 100 Botas NO 50 cl

Equipo Navazos celebrated its 15th birthday on 9 December 2020, and marked the occasion with its 100th bottling. An excuse for a new release, then, but what a release! The wine is a Manzanilla Pasada – like all the releases ending in zero. It’s a larger release than usual, combining three outstanding casks. The wine is some 14 years old. A key feature is that the butts have been kept close to full, well about Sherry’s usual 5/6 level meaning that there’s less flor; what's there is feeble through age. The resulting slow oxidation gives glorious complexity. Enough of the detail: the wine is simply sensational. A fabulous blend of elegance and intensity, with notes from the chalky Sanlucar terroir. If you have never tasted Equipo Navazos before, this is the place to begin. And if you are used to drinking light, pale, faint regular Manzanillas, then snap this up. It’s a revelation. Congratulations and Happy Anniversary Equipo Navazos.

The next of the single-cask Manzanilla Pasada (80, 60, 50, 40 and 20) is the NV La Bota de Manzanilla Pasada 100 Botas NO, selected from three butts (botas, in plural) to have more volume of the wine number 100. It's a bottling that always had more demand than supply. So, they made more bottles—2,700 half-liter ones and some larger formats. It was bottled in October 2020. Like in previous bottlings, it's bottled at 16.5% alcohol at an estimated average age of 15 years, the first 10 years under flor and the subsequent five with the barrels fully topped up, following an oxidative aging. This has more concentration and extract than the 110 I tasted next to it, but I favored the elegance and finesse of that other one. Still, it's a stratospheric wine, an explosion of concentration, flavors and minerality, a little more oxidative.