Review: Dry Sack Oloroso 15 Years Old Solera Especial
Review: Dry Sack Oloroso 15 Years Old Solera Especial
One reader recently asked why we don’t review much sherry around here, and the answer is simple: They don’t send us much sherry to review, and in fact they don’t sell much of it in the U.S. at all.
In fact, Williams & Humbert’s Dry Sack 15-year Oloroso is the first sherry we’ve formally reviewed here, and it’s a doozy. This is actually a blend of two sherries, a dry oloroso (78%) and Pedro Jimenez (22%), each blended separately with the solera style (in which wines are aged in a series of casks, with a portion of wine from each cask is progressively moved into the next-oldest cask every year until a tiny bit is finally drawn off the oldest cask and bottled, in this case after a total of 15 years through the process).
The result is a cryptic wine, dark oak in color and 20.5 percent alcohol. The nose is filled with raisins, but a nutty character becomes quite palpable as the raisin-like sweetness fades. The finish is spicy, with allspice and mulled wine; you get a whiff of these in the nose, too.
Dry Sack Oloroso 15 has a somewhat short finish, surprising considering the pedigree of what’s in the bottle, but that isn’t a major detraction from a wine that, at about $25 a bottle, is impressively inexpensive.
B+ / $25 [BUY IT NOW FROM THE WHISKY EXCHANGE]
Dry Sack Oloroso 15 Years Old Solera Especial
$25
