Regulatory Category: Jerez-Xérès-Sherry

Valdespino’s en rama release brings the unfiltered character of the cellar directly to the bottle. Drawn from the Inocente-adjacent soleras with minimal intervention, it offers a more vivid, more pungent and more complex profile than the filtered version.

The nose is expressive and direct: chamomile, fresh yeast, chalk and a distinctive mineral note from the albariza soils. The palate has a broader, more textural presence, with the bitterness and salinity of a wine that has seen no filtering. The finish is long and intensely saline. This is Fino as it tastes in the bodega, before the processes of preparation for commercial release intervene. Best consumed cold and fresh, within weeks of bottling.

Fino Inocente is one of the most important wines produced anywhere in the sherry triangle — a single-vineyard, barrel-fermented, indigenous-yeast Fino from the heart of the Macharnudo pago that offers a window onto what the greatest Finos of the nineteenth century must have tasted like. While every other bodega has moved to stainless steel tanks and cultured yeasts, Valdespino maintains the painstaking, expensive process of fermenting in 600-litre American oak butts with the wild yeasts present in the cellar. The result is a vast array of slightly different wines — sometimes two or three hundred casks per year — each with its own personality, blended through the solera to produce a final wine of extraordinary complexity and depth.

The nose is wide and rich for a Fino: warm chalk and mineral, ocean breeze, dried hay, salted almonds and subtle notes of vanilla from the oak — unusual in a biologically aged wine, and entirely the result of the wood fermentation. The palate is full-bodied yet elegant, growing in saltiness across the mid-palate and finishing long, with a beautiful balance of salinity and bitterness and hints of Amontillado emerging at the very end. Peter Liem, the foremost American authority on sherry, has called it «a fino of exceptional complexity, depth and distinction.» He is right.