NV Amontillado Pastrana

I was really surprised by the unexpected sharpness of an new wine from Hidalgo-La Gitana, the NV Amontillado Pastrana. It is a new, single-vineyard Amontillado from a plot within Miraflores in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. As with the Manzanilla Pasada from the same vineyard, this is a collaboration between Javier Hidalgo and Cristiano van Zeller from the Douro. This Amontillado is a wine averaging 30 years of age with a light mahogany color, quite bright and clear.The nose combines iron rust with pungent, marine, sea breeze aromas. The palate is pure salt and iodine, a piece of sea in a bottle that is a little extreme and sharp, pungent and penetrating. It's a wine that started it's life as a Manzanilla, so it was a sharp wine to start with and was sharpened further by its aging in a winery some 400 meters from the sea. An extreme Amontillado that dries your mouth. Cuts like a knife!