La Bota de Manzanilla 111 “florpower mmxviii” is, first and foremost, a vintage (2018) white wine, and a single-vineyard one, 100% varietally made from Palomino Fino sourced from vineyards in the Pago Miraflores La Baja (Sanlúcar). After one year ageing under flor at natural strength, it was slightly fortified with wine spirit and has additionally aged in Sanlúcar de Barrameda for almost three years following the traditional biological system. It is, therefore, a manzanilla: a single vineyard, vintage manzanilla.
It is also the same wine once bottled as La Bota de Florpower 97 MMXVIII (vintage 2018), as in its day we reserved some lots of that wine to be fortified from the beginning and aged as manzanilla, and then blended with some butts of Florpower 2018 that were fortified later on, after biological aging at natural alcohol levels.
We admit it is a complex scenario, and perhaps a complex message for the many wine professionals who daily bring the wines of Equipo Navazos to the tables of aficionados and restaurants all over the world: if Florpower has always been an unfortified white wine, why mess it up with a Manzanilla “florpower”? Well, because it’s what it is, and because the common thread of all our “florpowers” is the exceptional vineyard at Pago Miraflores La Baja from which they come and that always ends up imposing its character regardless of the aging style and whether the wine is fortified or not.
It’s both a manzanilla and Florpower 2018, only with a little added alcohol and and an extra year and a half of age under flor. We believe it is better to explain complex things as they are than to try and simplify something complex and lose it in the process. This may have to do with our opinion that much of the long crisis that traditional Andalusian wines have suffered has to do with oversimplified messages and 1970s marketing strategies based on homogenized products and mass market positioning. Those policies pushed many fine wine lovers away from our winemaking tradition.
Hopefully, this delicious 2018 manzanilla–a fine and delicate, yet racy wine–will help make a few more sherry aficionados; maybe in spite of the complex message, perhaps precisely because of it.
