Best Buys $10 And Under

92 points Wine Advocate
The new young red 2021 El Predilecto recovers Predilecto, which was a historic brand of the house, a wine with less aging than the rest and more fruity character. In this case, they want it to show the fruit expression of the vineyard without oak. They call it the new old concept in Rioja, what the wines used to be before the arrival of the French, pure fruit. It's a blend of 65% Garnacha from Cárdenas and Cordovín and 35% Tempranillo from Samaniego that fermented destemmed but uncrushed (so not exactly a carbonic maceration) with clean and fresh aromas and flavors. It's ripe and hedonistic, with 14.5% alcohol and good freshness. It matured in concrete for five months.

96 pts Wine Advocate
The Unico released in 2021, 10 years after the harvest, is the 2011 Unico, selected from 40 of their 210 hectares of vineyards. 2011 is a concentrated and ripe vintage, and they selected 95% Tinto Fino (Tempranillo) and 5% Cabernet Sauvignon that were cooled in a cold room for 24 hours before being sorted; the bunches and grapes macerated at 9 to 10 degrees Celsius for three to four days, and then it was inoculated with a pied de cuve to ferment with pumping overs. Malolactic was in stainless steel, and the wine was put through a long aging, 10 years between oak and bottle, using new and used French and American oak barrels and 20,000-liter oak vats. For Vega Sicilia, 2011 was a fresher year than 2010, not the common idea about those vintages in Ribera del Duero. The wine has a developed nose with some notes of ripe black fruit, meat and underbrush, somewhat herbal and perfumed. There is something about the nose of the Unicos that I cannot quite describe but is quite distinct, and it's in this vintage and also in the Reserva Especial.

95 points Wine Advocate
The obsession in 2019 was to avoid excess ripeness and to keep the freshness, so they did a softer vinification, used larger vats for the elevage and used less American wood. The 2019 Valbuena was produced with a blend of Tinto Fino with 3% Merlot. It has 14.5% alcohol, a pH of 3.88 and 4.6 grams of acidity. I love the nose; it is perfumed and subtle. And the wine is beautifully textured; the tannins are very fine, silky even, quite different from the tannins from the other 2019s from the group that I tasted next to this, Macan and Pintia. A triumph over the conditions of the year, it's a more elegant Valbuena than I anticipated. 190,490 bottles, 5,581 magnums and some larger formats produced. It was bottled in June 2022

Natural / Sustainable

Capitán Xurelo is a red blend from many different vineyards. It's produced like of the all reds here, with full clusters that were foot-trodden and fermented with indigenous yeasts. It finished fermenting in barrel and remained there until the next harvest, when it was transferred to stainless steel where it matured for a further eight months. Here, they look for a more austere, perhaps rustic profile. This has tons of notes of acid berries and is light to medium-bodied, with a minty and balsamic touch.

Organic

The new kid on the block is Vitícola Mentridana, a family and friends project from Dani Landi (Comando G) and Curro Bareño (Ca' di Mat and Fedellos) with family vineyards and some of the brands that used to belong to Landi. The first vintage is 2021, but the 2020s are already labeled and sold through this new project. In total, they have 15 hectares in Méntrida and Real de San Vicente, some owned, some rented, but all are worked by them organically (and in due time they should get the certification). Production is around 40,000 bottles. It's a great new addition to Gredos.

Lepanto is the only brandy to be distilled in the city of Jerez. Established in 1886, the company's brandies are all made from Palomino grapes and aged for 15 years, the difference being the cask used. This Solera Gran Reserva is matured in Oloroso Viejo (old) casks, resulting iin a dry and elegant delicious brandy.

Lepanto OV shows an intense amber color with dark copper tones. On the nose, complex aromas with hints of nuts, spices and mature wood. The palate is intense and extremely dry while maintaining an elegant smoothness.

"Saturated ruby. High-pitched aromas of redcurrant and cherry, with complicating notes of rose, spicecake and minerals. Taut and energetic, offering sweet red fruit flavors and a sexy floral quality. Fine-grained tannins add shape to a spicy, incisive finish. This could use some bottle age." 90+pts Vinous

"The seductive 1976 Vina Bosconia Gran Reserva is another ethereal beauty, revealing an expressive nose along with notes of earthiness, sweet perfumed fruit, cocoa, flowers and an occasional hint of white truffle that floats out of the glass. Fresher and more vibrant than the Tondonia Gran Reserva, it offers outstanding length and notable structure in an understated yet profound expression of Rioja. It is that rare wine that invites contemplation by engaging all of the taster?????s senses. A great effort. 95 Anticipated maturity: 2006-?" 95pts WA

"1978 was a very short vintage for Rioja with "only" 78 million liters of wine produced (compared with 135 million in 1981 or 128 million in 1973). That year Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and in Italy the terrorist group Red Brigades kidnapped and killed ex-Prime Minister Aldo Moro. The Vatican saw Pope John Paul I succeeding Pope Paul IV and Pope John Paul II succeeding Pope John Paul I shortly after. ?????Grease????? opened in cinemas and cult TV series ?????Mazinger Z????? aired in Spain, surely the first (and probably the last!) super robot manga series that I watched on TV. The vintage was officially declared "Muy Buena" (very good), while at CVNE they were a little more conservative about the quality of their wines and considered it simply "Buena." The 1978 Vi??a Real Gran Reserva was bottled unusually late, in February 1987. That might explain why I found the wine exceptionally dry, with smoky notes." WA

I think context is very important in wine, and when I drink old bottles I always think how the world was when they harvested the grapes: what happened that year, how people lived and how they made the wine. It's sometimes mind boggling to drink some very old wines, a real privilege which, I often say, is as close as you can get to time travel. So I've given some context to all these wines. I'm told nobody reads the tasting notes and people only look at the scores, let's see if we get some reaction on these. Even though the tasting was excellent, I expected even more; we had too many corked wines and some vintages had shown better on other occasions. But such is the case with old wines, there are no great vintages anymore, only great bottles. Highlights of the tasting were 1959, 1947 and 1938. On top of those, there was one outstanding and perfect wine that day, and, as I might not find better excuse to publish a note on it than now, I've included it here. It's an historical wine, a one-off, semi-sweet white produced at the end of the Spanish Civil War, a wine impossible to replicate, fruit of impossible circumstances, a wine I've had the luck to drink and share with many people on a number of occasions and which never fails to impress everyone.

"The flagship 2007 Contador receives the same elevage as the Cueva cuvee, the difference is based entirely on selection. Deep purple in color, it surrenders an already multifaceted perfume of sandalwood, truffle, Asian spices, incense, black cherry, and blackberry. On the palate it exhibits a satin texture, intense flavors, loads of spice, impeccable balance, and an elegant personality in combination with its power. It demands 6-8 years of cellaring at the minimum and its drinking window will extend from 2016 to 2042." 98pts WA

94pts Wine Advocate:
The Lot 38 La Bota de Viejo Cream Bota No is the sequel to the sweet oloroso that was Lot 19. It originates from the blending of a Pedro Ximenez over a century ago when the Solera was started. It has a fairly light bouquet that opens with aeration: hazelnut, macadamias, subtle note of caramel and nougat. The palate is medium-bodied with a lovely viscous opening: a touch of spice, eau-de-vie, caramel and cafe latte underpinned by beautifully judged acidity and a sensual harmonious long finish. Superb.

900 bottles produced. La Bota de Viejo Cream 38 "Bota NO" is a new release of edition 19 in the series: a sweet oloroso that has aged as such in a 9-butt solera under the label "Viejo Cream", never before commercially available except for a few exceptional sacas for British customers. This solera has in turn a bota NO as well as a double NO- of notably higher age and character, and which is where this wine has been sourced, again in limited volumes. This sweet oloroso results from a blending process with top-quality pedro ximénez that was performed early on, when the solera was founded, likely over a century ago. Harmonious integration during these decades has made the wine finer and rounder, thanks to the patience of several generations of winemakers, reaching today a prodigious balance between the raciness of dry oloroso and the mellowness of sweet PX.

What originally started out as a private buying club for an outstanding Amontillado located in the cellar of Miguel Sánchez Ayala, has become one of the most sought after series of bottlings sourced from, and inspired by the wines of Jerez and Montilla-Moriles. Jesús Barquín, a professor of criminal law at the University of Granda and Eduardo Ojeda, the technical director of Grupo Estévez, guided by their vast knowledge of, and unparalleled access to, the best wines, cellars and soleras of the region, have since 2005 assembled one of the finest offerings of Sherries in the market. When word got out about their project, what was once a hobby became a full-fledged commercial enterprise. Supply remains limited and demand has only increased. Since that first cask of Amontillado, labeled simply Bota de Amontillado no.1 in honor of the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, each successive bottling as been numbered, bottled en rama, limited in release and quick to sell out. Not content with only exploring the possibilities of fortified wines, Equipo has also released brandies, unfortified Palomino Fino aged under flor, and a couple of PX wines, one dry and one made from raisined grapes. They have also partnered with Dirk Niepoort and Quim Vila to make a Vin Jaune styled Palomino Fino and Sergei Colet to produce a Cava utilizing flor in the secondary aging of the wine as well as Sherry and Montilla for the dosage.

Antonio Hidalgo, President, is the 6th generation of Sherry winemakers and still family owned and operated - Bodegas Hidalgo La Gitana. The winery was founded in 1792 by Pantaleon Hidalgo in Sanlucar de Barrameda, Spain. Surrounded all his life with the wonderful world of wines and wine makers has given him the opportunity to be front line with the changes and evolution of Spanish wines in the last two decades. Antonio envisioned from his native Spain to position wines from his country in the United States and that is how Hidalgo Imports was born in 2006. Over the years, wines from other countries where necessary to cover all of our clients demands and that is how we started to distribute wines from Argentina, Chile, Italy and France. A great amount of Hidalgo Imports wines have received the highest ratings from the most important magazines and specialized people in the industry, obtaining great recognition in the country, proving that his long career and experience play a very import role in the profile of the company.