Equipo Navazos - Beyond Sherry

The wines of Equipo Navazos have taken the sherry world by storm and have won countless accolades and awards. No one who tastes the wines can doubt that they have set a new benchmark for Sherry. Many of our customers will already know the Equipo Navazos story. For those who do not, Navazos was started by wine writer and Sherry guru Jesús Barquín, regular contributor to World of Fine Wine and Professor of Criminology at the University of Granada. Jesús and his sherryphile colleagues were aware, through their own extensive tastings, of a treasure trove of brilliant Sherries that were sitting, unbottled, in bodegas in Jerez, Sanlucar and Montilla. These wines would typically been used in blends and then bottled commercially with fining and hard filtration. For years Barquín had encouraged the bodegas, through his writing and personal contacts, to bottle some of these gems off as individual wines, unfiltered, so the world could be reminded of the remarkable heights that Sherry could reach. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. Finally the decision was taken to do the work themselves, to purchase and bottled these wines themselves. They knew where these wines were and, remarkably, they had the contacts and relationships to do it. First the wines were bottled only for friends (for the ‘equipo’ or team Navazos) yet these friends included influential journalists like Jancis Robinson and retailers and restaurateurs who spread the word and urged Barquín to bottle more wine for the world’s Sherry drinkers. Finally the decision was taken to bottle and release small quantities (necessarily small) to the general market and in 2010 we were able to get our first, tiny allocation to Australia. Our shipments throughout 2011 mostly sold out before they hit our shores.

Those of you who do not know these wines may wonder at the prices. Some context. These are selections of the very finest and distinctive barrels sitting in many of the finest Sherry bodegas in Spain that are purchased and bottled unfiltered. They are, almost by definition, the greatest Sherries on the... learn more