Solera del Toro

Bodegas Toro Albalá traces its origins to 1844, when the family founded a small bodega in an old mill known as La Noria, at the foot of the Castillo de Aguilar de la Frontera, in the Córdoba province of Andalusia. In 1922, José María Toro Albalá acquired and restored the town’s old electric power station — a vast facility with deep underground cellars made for long ageing — and moved the bodega there. That move marked the founding of the modern house and the philosophy that has defined it ever since: patience. Wines and vinegars left to age for years, sometimes decades, until they become what the house calls enological jewels. The pivotal modern figure is Antonio Sánchez, who took control in the 1960s, embraced the vintage añadas system for Montilla-Moriles wines, and earned Toro Albalá a place among Spain’s hundred Bodegas de Oro. Solera del Toro is drawn from the Bodega de Moriles, where over a thousand oak botas hold a long solera y criaderas fractional system. The base wine is Pedro Ximénez from D.O.P. Montilla-Moriles, grown on the white albariza soils. This is a vinegar of Montilla-Moriles — Toro Albalá’s flagship — not a sherry vinegar from Jerez; the appellation is its own, the wine is its own, and the cellar is its own.