Equipo Navazos I Think Manzanilla Saca de February de 2020 375ml

This has incredible quality for the price.

Luis Gutierrez (The Wine Advocate)

About This Wine

Plucked from the production of La Guita, where Navazos co-founder Eduardo Ojeda oversees production in his role as the Technical Director of José Estévez. As with all their releases, this wine was bottles direct from cask, eschewing traditional sterile filtration.

Bottled in February 2020, it's a potent and briny wine, with a seductively deep texture and a deep tangy drive. The wines spent over 4 years under flor, providing a vibrant orange/gold colour and some nutty development.

It's a much deeper colour than almost all other Manzanillas in its price bracket, in part due to the direct bottling and lack of filtration common amongst most commercial production. This aged and unfiltered style makes this wine stand out amongst those other Manzanillas, as it is worlds apart in terms of complexity and interest.

About Equipo Navazos

The Equipo Navazos project was started by a group of Spanish Sherry lovers led by wine writer and Sherry guru Jesús Barquín, regular contributor to World of Fine Wine and Professor of Criminology at the University of Granada. These “Sherryphiles” were aware, through their own extensive tastings, of a treasure trove of brilliant Sherries that were sitting, unbottled, in the bodegas of Jerez, Sanlucar and Montilla. Bodegas often have butts or casks (bota) of Sherry whose small volume makes it commercially unviable to bottle separately

The concept behind Equipo Navazos (Team Navazos) was to select specific bota of such wines for individual bottling, unfiltered or lightly filtered (Sherry is typically put through a very firm filtration). The wines were selected for their quality and for their distinct personalities, which would have been a shame to lose in a large blend. Initially these bottlings were intended only for a select group of friends and professionals. Yet the response was so enthusiastic that it became very clear to those behind Equipo Navazos that something important could come of this idea; namely that the opportunity existed to remind the world of just how great Sherry could be. To this end the project was expanded to allow for a small ‘commercial’ release of certain wines to a handful of international markets. After three years, Australia started to get a tiny allocation.