Hauntingly Delicate, Painfully Intense
Gutiérrez Colosía
Palo Cortado Solera Familiar 500ml
Gutiérrez Colosía Palo Cortado Solera Familiar works on a crazy amount of registers.
It's simultaneously rich, bone-crushing, almost painfully intense while also having a razor cut, haunting delicacy and perfume.
Palo Cortado is the most complicated and potentially one of the most profound categories of sherry. This one shows just how complex and multifaceted Palo Cortado can be.
When I visited Gutiérrez Colosía in 2011, they asked me what wine I'd like to take as a gift. Without any hesitation, I chose the Palo Cortado Solera Familiar.
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Undoubtedly, this is a special bottle of Palo Cortado and very likely the best wine to come out of Gutiérrez Colosía. It's a very old and complex Palo Cortado - the average age is over fifty years. They release somewhere around four hundred 500ml bottles per year.
The real story behind what makes Gutiérrez Colosía special, though, is location. Gutiérrez Colosía is the last surviving bodega on the banks of the Guadalete River. It's a sweet spot in an especially cool and humid location, very close to where the Guadalete empties out into the Bay of Cádiz. As quoted in Peter Liem's and Jesús Barquín's Sherry, Manzanilla & Montilla, Juan Carlos Gutiérrez says, "In Sanlúcar they talk about being close to the sea, but nobody is closer to the sea than we are."
The location gives the wines a saline delicacy that I love. Even with the intensity that age and oxidative aging bring, Gutiérrez Colosía's Palo Cortado Solera Familiar has these qualities in spades. It's a really beautiful thing.
The Palo Cortado Solera Familiar has the crushing, gripping intensity of old Palo Cortado while maintaining fineness, delicacy, incredible precision and cut along with insane length. The combination of fineness and power is what makes it stand out even among the region's best.
To order, please email us at offers@crushwineco.com or call the store at (212) 980-9463.
Joe Salamone
Wine Buyer
Crush Wine & Spirits
Gutierrez Palo Cortado Familiar 500ml