Given that my MW dissertation was on the subject of en rama sherries, it’s only appropriate that my first wine of the week post should be about one.

First off, what is an ‘en rama’ sherry? The truth is that there’s no official definition of the term en rama (which isn’t terribly helpful) By and large, if you see the words on the label of a sherry bottle, you can be pretty sure that it’s been bottled with minimum intervention from the winemaker. (In technical terms, most of them are unfined, and have only been lightly filtered.) The idea is to help guide sherry lovers towards an experience that’s the next best thing to drinking sherry straight from the butt.

Equipo Navazos bottles high-end sherries sourced from individual sherry butts produced by a number of bodegas scattered throughout the sherry triangle. The I Think en rama is bottled in small batches and released on an ad hoc basis (roughly one bottling every year or two).

This particular version was drawn from the butt in October 2014 and is a really classic manzanilla, with potent flavours of salted almonds and green olives, as well as a tangy, briny freshness. The texture is quite silky, and the mid-palate has plenty of sustained, rich flavour.

Apart from anything else, I just love the I Think label, which features the tree of life drawn by Charles Darwin in one of his notebooks during the period when he was working out his theory of evolution.

Rating:  (What does this mean? See here for guide to my rating system)