Toro Albalá put aside select lots of their best vintage wines for later release under the Gran Reserva label. These rich and complex Pedro Ximénez wines are destined for very long aging in oak barrels. After filling and sealing, these barrels are left for decades in their single-vintage state. It’s during this slow maturation that the wines undertake their delicious, savoury transformation (through controlled exposure to oxygen), which brings the nutty, iodine, rancio characters that infinitely complex the sweet, fruit-cakey wine and also somehow gives a greater impression of freshness. Naturally, as the wines age, they concentrate in flavour and texture, the colour darkens and the mouthfeel thickens. Yet at the same time, something more vibrant emerges as the levels of acidity also rise. After close to 30 years in barrel, the 1990 is absolutely singing. It has 387 grams of residual.