Cayetano del Pino | Palo Cortado Solera | Jerez

For eighty years this house did not bottle. On 19 November 1886, Cayetano del Pino — a young man from La Carlota, in Córdoba, who had started working in Jerez in 1883 — registered Cayetano del Pino & Cía. as a wine exporting company, with Alberto Romero and with Manuel de la Calzada, son of the banker Tomás de la Calzada.

On the death of Cayetano del Pino Balbontín, in 1935, the house stopped bottling and became an almacenista: it aged its old wines and sold them to the large bodegas of Jerez, which released them under their own labels. Its wines have appeared that way in Lustau's Almacenista range. Not until 2015, with the fourth generation, did it sell wine under its own name again.

In 1983 they bought the Plaza Silos premises, which had belonged to Pedro Domecq and were the bodega where Fino La Ina was aged. In September 2022 the winery passed to Grupo Mesgal Patrimonial, owned by Fulgencio Meseguer Galán. The house is one of the benchmarks for Palo Cortado, and it is almost all they make.

The Fino comes from albariza in the Balbaina pago, in Jerez Superior, one of the four first-rank pagos of the Marco. It ages under a veil of flor in the criaderas y solera system, in American oak butts, averaging nine years: well beyond the three to five of an ordinary fino.

The Palo Cortado is first-pressing Palomino on albariza of the Superior zone, in the San Miguel quarter of Jerez, and comes from a flor that fell of its own accord: two years of biological ageing and sixteen oxidative, some eighteen in all.