Vintage sherry or Jerez de Añada is extremely rare, so rare that a lot of introductions to sherry wines will simply tell you it doesn’t exist. Obviously the Solera system is essential to sherry and accounts for the vast majority of production, but vintages do exist. In fact before the invention and development of the solera principle in the second half of the 18th century, all sherry was created as a vintage wine, and the añada concept was still widely in use until the early 20th century. It was then largely forgotten for the sake of consistency, but recently there is a renewed interest in vintage sherry and the static development (without blending) in general. Gonzalez Byass has been selecting some 200 butts of sherry every year, from a total harvest of around 20.000 butts, that are kept aside as vintage casks. In 1994 they introduced their Vintage Collection to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the first shipment of Tio Pepe. Since then, a different vintage has been selected and put on the market. All of them are wines that haven’t been fined nor filtered and that have been bottled by hand. Bottles in the Gonzalez Byass Vintage Collection are small pieces of art: they are ‘Jerezana’ style bottles, similar to those used around 1850. They have a handwritten label, they’re individually numbered and signed by the chairman of the company. Gonzalez Byass MillenniumThe first añadas released by Gonzalez Byass in 1994 were the Oloroso 1963 and Oloroso 1966. The year after, the Oloroso Añada 1964 was marketed. Since then, we’ve seen a list of other vintages: 1967, 1969, 1970, 1979, 1982. We’ve also seen 1978, 1979 and 1982 vintages that were Palo Cortado. Depending on the vintage, between 500 and 3000 bottles will be available. A special kind of multi-vintage was the Gonzalez Byass Millenium, a mixture of wines from every decade of the 20th Century (1902, 1917, 1923, 1935, 1946, 1957, 1962, 1977, 1983, 1992 and 1996). Only 2000 bottles were filled. In 2014, a whole series of vintages were made available as a limited edition (30 bottles each) for Selfridges in London. Some of these are re-releases of vintages that already appeared on the market before.