Bodegas Elías Mora, Toro (Castilla y León, Spain) 2018

 Only 250 cases of this wine were produced in honor of Victoria Benvenides’ father, and I’ve never seen it before, so your odds of finding a bottle without some earnest efforts are pretty slim.  It offers spectacular purity of fruit on a big but stylish frame, with essentially perfect balance between the fruit’s density and the French oak’s supportive structure.  Silky texture and near-perfect integration suggests that the fruit was immaculate for starters and then treated with great care when macerated and fermented, and oak aging was only 12 months in duration — half the time of the Reserva from this house.  The fruit is sourced from 50-year-old, single vineyard “La Cañadica” estate.  It was absolutely marvelous when re-tasted after 24 hours — impeccable and fresh, lithe but still very expressive both aromatically and in terms of flavor, without any extraneous weight.  This is substantially more expensive than anything in the Elías Mora lineup, and that always seems to exert some pressure to beef up a wine and whack it with a lot of oak so that buyers will feel like they got their money’s worth.  However, my impression was that this wasn’t made with buyers in mind, but rather as an homage, and wow… what a tribute, both to Don Daniel and also to the skill of all who tended the vines and helped craft this wine.