The music was deafening. I watched as ripples spread through my wine with each thump of the bass. Tucking my elbows in so as not to bump the person at the next table, I leaned forward. ‘I just realised something’, I shouted across the tiny table, ‘I’m in my 30s. I don’t like restaurants with loud music. And I don’t like mouse in my wine.’
Twenty minutes later we emerged from one of Portland’s hottest restaurants only slightly worse for the wear.
‘I can’t believe how much that wine tasted like Fritos’, Kip said, stunned by his first experience of mouse taint, a microbial infection that makes wines taste somewhere between corn chips and hamster cage to those who are sensitive to it.
We looked at each other and laughed.
‘Let’s find somewhere quiet’, I suggested, and we walked a few blocks before ducking into a restaurant with soft lighting and half a dozen patrons.
‘Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick’, Robert Smith sang at an appropriate volume.
We sank gratefully into seats at the bar and there, on the menu, gleamed the words, ‘Equipo Navazos 115 La Bota de Fino’. My heart raced. I was suddenly very grateful the other restaurant hadn’t worked out.
Jancis, Julia, Ferran, Tam, Richard and Nick have all praised Equipo Navazos. There are no fewer than 76 articles on our site that mention them. And yet I’ve only ever tasted their en rama (lightly filtered) fino, an excellent small-batch wine but one that doesn’t generate quite the same zealotry as the numbered releases.
My heart stuttered a bit when the glass was set in front of me: rather than the pale-lemon colour I’ve come to expect in fino, it was a soft apricot, and I worried that it was past its prime. It was not. It smelled fresh and characterful – the note I scrawled on the margin of the menu reads, ‘Could a wine be more Spanish? It smells like the sea, rich, fatty Valencia almonds, orange zest kneaded into yeasty bread dough, a touch of Manzanilla olive brine and a caramelly tang like birch syrup. It’s richer and more savoury than any fino I’ve encountered, with heightened viscosity and concentration. The finish goes on forever.’
When Jancis tasted this wine, freshly bottled in September of 2022, her note included, ‘Hint of molten dry treacle.’ Reading it the next day I thought it was a better descriptor than my ‘birch syrup’.
But where did the sterling reputation of this producer come from?
Well, unlike producers who are reliant on the synthesis of land quality, vintage conditions and winemaker expertise – which can’t reach a pinnacle every year no matter how much a PR company may try to convince you – Equipo Navazos was built on finding the best finished sherry regardless of the source, maker or blend of vintages, and buying it by the barrelful. (They have since expanded into unfortified wines and whisky.)
The brand started out as a hobby: in December 2005 a group of sherry aficionados including Jesús Barquín, a professor of criminology, and Eduardo Ojeda, who was, until recently, the technical director for Grupo Estévez (owners of Valdespino, Bodegas Marqués del Real Tesoro and La Guita), visited Bodegas Sánchez Ayala in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. There they were shown butts of 20-year-old amontillado – a rarity, and not something that the winery made available for commercial sale. After tasting through 65 different barrels, Barquín and Ojeda convinced the producer to part with a barrel. They bottled it and split it among their group of aficionados.
For their second bottling, the group bought butts of old fino from the cellars of Valdespino. Then, for their third, they begged Pedro Ximénez from the cellars of Pérez Barquero. They bottled these one-of-a-kind wines and drank them with friends, winemakers, writers, distributors and sommeliers. Then, at the beginning of 2007, they sold a small number of bottles to a few prominent merchants and distributors, and the brand began to gain a following.
Twenty years on, each lot is still small (there were only 5,000 bottles produced of the La Bota 115 Fino – a fact I find baffling considering the number of countries it’s available in) but sourcing is somewhat more regular. While Barquín and Ojeda don’t own vineyards, there are a few constants. For instance, the 115 is the tenth edition of La Bota de Fino (the first was bottled in 2006). All of the wines in the series (releases 2, 7, 15, 18, 27, 35, 54, 68, 91 and 115) have come from Macharnudo Alto, an area of around 500 hectares (1,235 acres) containing multiple vineyards – El Majuelo, Santa Isabel, Valdespino, La Escribana, La Compañía, La Carreña, Picón, etc (you can see a map of the area here). This is the most renowned pago in Jerez, planted on pure albariza, a white soil high in calcareous microfossils. Equipo Navazos sources the 115 from a bodega that farms their vineyards entirely by hand and without chemical inputs.
Once the Palomino grapes are harvested – generally in mid August – the fruit comes into the cellar and is direct-pressed. The must is then settled before being split between cask and stainless-steel tank to undergo spontaneous fermentation. Once it has finished fermenting – creating a base wine of around 12.5% alcohol – it is racked off lees and fortified to a final alcohol level of 15% by the addition of grape spirit (wine that has been distilled to create a spirit of 96% alcohol).
Then the wine is put back into the same casks where it fermented, where some barrels will develop the veil of yeast called flor that defines fino sherries. These fino barrels will be added to a system of criaderas, or tiers, each tier older than the next, and a fraction of the younger wines is blended with the older ones to maintain a particular character and complexity. While the minimum number of criaderas in a fino solera in DO Jerez is three, the producer that Equipo Navazos works with can have up to ten criaderas in a solera! (For a detailed explanation of the blending system used in sherry, see under solera in the Oxford Companion to Wine.)
For the Equipo Navazos Bota de Fino, Barquín and Ojeda generally select barrels from the oldest criaderas, although they’ve changed the average age of the wines in the 115 from 10–11 years to 8, as they prefer the balance and freshness.
The 115 is listed by half a dozen UK stockists on Wine-Searcher with the lowest price being £35.99 for 750 ml from Thorne Wines. Prices are, miraculously, lower in the US, as low as $34.99 for 750 ml from Wine House in LA. The wine is also available in Spain, Ireland, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Australia and Argentina. Equipo Navazos has the most impressively detailed list of distributors I have ever seen on a winery website – so it should be no problem finding the distributor in your country.
Images © Equipo Navazos.
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