The sherry secret

David Harker, owner of Newcastle Wine School, takes a fresh look at a famous wine

Do you want to know a secret? The next big thing in wine is going to be sherry… Again.

Sherry is always on the cusp of a revival, thanks to the wishful thinking of wine commentators and the determined efforts of PR executives. Just don’t hold your breath as the story of sherry is a tale of boom, bust and repeat.

Sherry was once a big thing. The English nobility have had a taste for it since medieval times. Sherry sustained Columbus as he ventured over the horizon to discover the new world. When war inconvenienced trade, Sir Francis Drake sailed into Cadiz, singed the Spanish king’s beard by setting fire to the Spanish fleet, and made off with 3,000 barrels of stolen sherry. To this day, misbehaving Spanish schoolchildren are threatened with the dreaded El Draque.

Sherry sack warmed the blood of Shakespeare’s Falstaff and provided Dutch courage to Samuel Pepys. Bonnie Prince Charlie had, perhaps, a little too much sherry before the disaster of Culloden. Future American president Thomas Jefferson said he “would rather drink nothing else.” Charles Dickens was an aficionado of what he described as the “golden juice.” By the middle of the 19th Century, 40% of wine imported into England was sherry.

So where did it all go wrong? Greed and imitation were the main culprits. Unscrupulous merchants doctored the genuine article to meet demand. Poor imitations from South Africa, Australia and California provided a cheap alternative. A drop off in quality coincided with a fashion for lighter, dry wines that were more favourably taxed. By the turn of the 20th Century, sherry sales were in the doldrums.

The spirit of sherry was kept alive in the jazz age by the popularity of American, sherry-based cocktails; not least the sherry cobbler – a mix of sherry, sugar syrup and a slice of orange. Once the world’s most popular cocktail, it is served strained over crushed ice to be sipped through a straw. It’s even said it is responsible for the popular adoption of the drinking straw.

The opening of a sherry bar in the Dorchester in 1931 marked a return to popularity. The 1930s also saw the introduction of strict controls to improve quality and guarantee authenticity. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-70s sherry enjoyed another golden age. But once again, fashions changed and the sales graph dipped. It is yet to fully recover.

So, what is sherry?

A white wine which is fortified, that is made stronger by the addition of grape spirit (brandy) – and then aged in oak barrels. It must be made from grapes grown in the sherry region of southern Spain and aged in, or around, the triangle of sherry towns – Jerez de la Frontera, Sanlúcar de Barrameda and El Puerto de Santa María.

An important element of sherry making is the ageing process. It is aged for anything between two to 30 years or more. The ageing takes place in vast, cool, cathedral-like bodegas with the barrels organised in a solera system. In a solera, wine for bottling is extracted from the bottom row of barrels at floor level. The extracted wine is replaced by wine from a second row of barrels sitting on top of the bottom row. The second row is topped up from a third row. The third row is then replenished by that year’s vintage. This means that each bottle of sherry contains wine from a number of successive vintages.

Sherry comes in a range of styles – from bone dry to intensely sweet.

Most sherry is dry and made from the palomino grape. The key to understanding the different types of dry sherry is to know how much grape spirit has been added, and how the wine has been aged.

If the base wine is fortified to only 15% then, as the wine ages in barrel, a protective blanket of yeast (flor) will develop on the surface of the wine. If the wine is aged in the coastal town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda then it is referred to as manzanilla. If aged elsewhere in the sherry region, it is called fino. Both manzanilla and fino are relatively light, dry wines with aromas of fresh dough and blanched almonds.

If the base wine is fortified to more than 15% then the protective flor will not develop and the wine will be exposed to oxygen as it ages. This gives a much darker wine with aromas of walnuts, caramel and smoke. This will appeal to malt whisky lovers and is labelled oloroso.

Between the fino and oloroso styles is a wine that is initially fortified to only 15%, and so begins its ageing under flor. It is then further fortified to kill off the blanket of yeast and completes its maturation exposed to oxygen. This wine is amontillado, more hazelnut than walnut and lighter than oloroso.

There are also two sweet styles of sherry. The intensely sweet, dark and syrupy PX made from dried Pedro Ximénez grapes, and the less common and less sweet moscatel.

So, what of Harvey’s Bristol Cream? Cream sherries are dry sherries blended with a little sweet wine to give a medium-sweet sherry. Warm, dusty bottles of cream sherry, retrieved from the back of an elderly aunt’s sideboard at Christmas and drank from a tiny schooner, have scarred many a sherry drinker. However, a fresh bottle of good quality cream sherry, served chilled in a wine glass, can be a delight. This is also a good place to start your sherry journey.

The range of sherry styles makes it a wine for all seasons – chilled fino as a summer aperitif, amontillado when the autumn nights draw in, and oloroso as a winter warmer.

The diversity of sherry also lends itself to a wide range of food pairings. There is no better match for mock turtle soup than a glass of amontillado. If mock turtle isn’t your thing, then use this adage – if it swims, pair with fino; if it flies, amontillado; and if it runs, then oloroso. A simple plate of jamón and manchego works wonderfully with every dry style, while PX is sweet enough to stand up to the sweetest of desserts or simply pour over ice cream.

Sherry may not be a drink that appeals to every palate, but the quality and price today means that there has never been a better time to try one of the world’s great wines. It is a wine which will reward drinkers in search of an authentic experience, and it’s going to be the next big thing you know…