4th December 2006 Maury, 1928 Solera, les Vignerons de Maury, Roussillon, France, £14.95/50cl, Averys What a wonderful idea. You fill up some barrels with wine in 1928 and each year you draw off a bit, see how it tastes, maybe sell some, and top up the barrel with new wine. This is how they make the unique, unbelievably concentrated, dark Oloroso sherries in Spain. The lovely thing is that even today there will be a little – maybe not much, but a bit – of the original 1928 wine in the bottle, and a dash of pretty much every vintage in between, so the flavour eventually becomes a cavalcade of the whole history of the wine, in this case 78 years. And you can taste the history: this lovely wine smells of a ripe essence of sweet nuts, deep and old and silent; there's a dark date and fig syrup richness; there's the sweet caramel nuttiness of buttered brazils; and you never quite lose a sense of dust drifting in through the cellar window over the generations. Taken from Oz Clarke's Wine Buying Guide 2007 Printable Tasting Sheet