Imagine my delight when I was in my local wine shop, the Fine Wine Source in Livonia, Michigan, and it was the first time, that I ever had a wine, one year younger than myself.  I have had a few wines that were older, the majority have been younger.  A very unique situation and most enjoyable.  I had a chance to try Familia Fernandez de Manzanos “Manzanos Red Wine 1955 Spain.”

Bodegas Manzanos is a large wine producer in Spain, founded in 1890 and is now run by the fifth generation of the Fernandez de Manzanos family.  They are in the top three of Navarra and the top five in Rioja for production and they own ten wineries.  The original winery for the family is in the Rioja Alta zone back in 1890.  The newest generation has been going through all the facilities on all the properties.  Around 2020 they discovered a cache of bottles under canvases, forgotten and untouched since they bottled the wine 1961 Vino Tinto, so probably 1964/5.  They originally must have thought that the wine could use some additional maturation time in the bottle, and it was forgotten about in a hillside cellar.  Each bottle was opened and tasted to determine if it was still good.  Then the bottles were emptied into a Stainless-Steel vat.  The decision was made to rebottle, recork, and relabel the wine.  That wine was labeled Familia Fernandez de Manzanos “Manzanos Red Wine 1961 Spain” as the designation of Rioja was not internationally known as it is today. 

History sometimes has a way of repeating itself.  A hidden cellar was discovered with three hundred some bottles of a 1955 vintage.  They contacted the Rioja Association who oversaw that each bottle was opened using inert gas and checked to have no flaws, poured into a Stainless-Steel vat.  Then new bottles, new labels and they ended up with about one-hundred pristine bottles of Familia Fernandez de Manzanos “Manzanos Red Wine 1955 Spain.” Some background on the wine.  This wine is a blend of Tempranillo and Garnacha (Grenache) from vineyards of predominantly alluvial and clay-ferrous soils.  The fruit was harvested in the manner of the mid-Twentieth Century tradition of hand-picking in small baskets.  The aging was done in old oak barrels.  This wine offers a window into how Rioja wines were from that era.  I was fortunate to have been invited to taste the wine from a couple of sample bottles that were offered and of course, the Fine Wine Source bought the entire shipment.  The wine still had a nice garnet color with bright highlights to it, in the glass and it offered notes of dried fruits, spices, cocoa and an unmatchable nose of tradition and age.  On the palate there were tones of dried fruit, totally different from fruit-bombs that are the rage these days, and blended in with layers of sous bois (a descriptor that I seldom use, but for this wine, I guess it is imperative, and it is used to convey a wet forest floor – earthiness – an ethereal term) and old tobacco.  This was not a spring chicken, and I had the good fortune to be at the store on another visit, and I believe the entire lot of the ’61 is gone, and there is one bottle left of the ’55.