Lustau Oloroso VORS 30 years

This has a very complex nose with dried apricots, mahogany, grilled almonds and a very fresh, pure and precisely struck rancio thread. Spiced-biscuit and praline flavors run long with a super fine, elegant and layered feel, it builds long and bright on the finish with a very fresh wash of salty, acid tang to close. Superb. Drink now.

The NV Oloroso VORS, produced with Palomino grapes and aged in a solera system for an average of 30 years shows a bright dark amber color. It starts with some reductive notes, which might seem like a contradiction for a wine that has aged oxidatively for such a long time, but it all depends on how long the wine has been in bottle. If this happens to you, with this or any other old Sherry, you only need to give it plenty of air. I know it’s not very convenient, but once the producer has gone through the trouble of aging the wine for such a long time and you go through the expense of purchasing one of this bottles, you might as well wait one day rather than using it for cooking or pouring it down the drain. Anyway, once it blows away, the bright orange-colored wine reveals a pleasant nose of toffee, ash, chestnuts, honey and orange marmalade. The palate is intense, with flavors of cedar wood and spiced nuts, ending slightly salty. Drink 2013-2018.

In contrast to its Amontillado sibling, this VORS Oloroso is a slightly (though not dramatically) darker wine: pale walnut with orange glints. There’s a ringing purity to its bell-clear aromas, capable of perfuming an entire room on their own: citrus fruits, basmati rice, dried fruit skins, dried mushrooms, furniture polish and much else. It’s a wine of enormous intensity and flavour resource, and even in the mouth it seems to generate as much perfume as flavour, with all of the aromatic allusions resumed here for the finding. There is, too, acidity and a mist of fine-grained tannin, both the product of the ageing process as much as of the relatively low-acidity Palomino wines with which the wine began life. Every wine lover should taste sherry of this order of grandeur at least once; there is, truly, nothing quite like it.