Frontline Wine: Sherry, A Neglected Delight

Your granny keeps a half empty, sticky bottle of the stuff at the back of her cupboard. The last time you drank it aged seventeen, you puked your ring so violently that your stomach popped out of your mouth like an airbag. The only time you ever want to see it again is if it’s covered in cream and wrapped in a thick, protective blanket of trifle. Most people will not touch sherry. Bad memories or a predisposition to its supposed awfulness keep it at arms length.

Sherry is the most exciting, interesting and enjoyable wine you can buy. It is high quality quaff with a wide variety of styles at rock bottom prices (mainly due to its pariah status amongst the ignorant). Forget the disgusting efforts made in New Zealand, Australia and most places outside of its home in Andalucía; they are fortified, chemical-laden enamel strippers that are made solely for the student/cheapskate/granny/alcoholic niche market…real sherry from Jerez is a complex, food specialist wine to make any meal great.

Produced only on a small triangle of land between the towns of Jerez, Sanlucar and Puerta de Santa Maria in Andalucia, Southern Spain, this is one of the hottest, driest parts of the country with temperatures regularly topping 45C in the summer months. The area is covered in a white calcareous soil (albariza) that soaks up and retains the little rainfall the area receives each year, making it possible to grow grapes, whilst imparting a distinctive minerality to the end wine.

Base dry sherry is either called manzanilla, produced in the seaside town of Sanlucar, or fino which is produced everywhere else in the Jerez triangle outside of Sanlucar. They are both very similar in style, but Manzanilla is considered slightly better due to extra freshness and a briney flavour left by the strong sea breeze enjoyed by the town.

These dry sherry styles start off as a very bland, uninteresting base white wine. The grapes are lightly pressed to produce a low alcohol, juicy, dry style that’s purpose is to serve as a blank canvas to the proceeding process. This light wine is fortified with brandy and laid to rest in large 600L American oak barrels in the bodega.

A curious thing happens at this stage. The barrels are only filled to 500L so as to leave a large gap to encourage a unique, top-floating indigenous yeast called flor to grow. This yeast develops into a thick, milky film that protects the sherry from oxidation in the barrel. The flor is so delicate that shaking it or breaking the film without the use of a special thin tasting instrument called a venencia will cause it to die….and most likely bugger the whole barrel.

The flor imparts its yeasty flavour to the wine, the American oak barrels give it a certain nuttiness, the sea air steaming in through the winery’s open windows give a briney character, and then there is fruitiness from the juicy base wine, all combining and mingling over time in the barrel under the protective cover of the flor. If you’re having nibbles in the house with guests, you can pick these flavours in the wine apart at the seams. Try a chilled bottle of manzanilla with these four things: hard cheese, anchovies, salted walnuts and green olives. It is an amazing food and wine experience. Each bite you take reacts differently with the main, constituent flavours of the manzanilla giving you a wine that tastes different everytime you sip it…much more interesting than mushroom vol-a-vents and cheap kiwi Chard.

Instead of bottling it, you can further fortify the manzanilla/fino in the barrel to the point where the flor dies, allowing the air to come into contact with, and begin oxidising the sherry over time. This style is called amontillado. You get the freshness of the dry base sherry, but it is a much more developed and complex style, with the extra kick and intensity of flavour from the added alcohol. Amontillado can be served chilled or at room temperature and tastes best with cured meats, liver and manchego cheese.

The oloroso style of sherry is produced by fortifying the base white wine up to an alcoholic strength that’s toxic to the growth of flor. This unique yeast never gets to grow on an oloroso. This means the sherry is exposed to the air for the whole time it is in barrel, producing a very full flavoured, intense, nutty style. Oloroso is best served with cheese so stinking and rancid that it makes the escapee Brussel sprout that rolled under the fridge unnoticed last Christmas look as fresh as a ripe strawberry. This is (another) wine and food experience that will leave you pissing around in work, dreamily looking out of your office window as you think about it.

Pedro Ximenez is a white grape variety that produces a very, very sweet sherry. 100% PX sherries are so unctuously sticky and sweet, they taste best poured over vanilla ice cream like a syrup. Forget speed dating, getting pissed in pubs, Belgian chocolates and love letters. Stick ice cream covered in PX in front of any sweet toothed lady gentlemen, and I guarantee you’ll have 5 children and mortgage before you’ve had time to finish your chat up line. To produce this style, the grapes are left in the hot sunshine for a couple of days to shrivel as the natural fruit sweetness is concentrated. The grapes are then pressed, fermented and fortified with brandy before being left in the 600L barrels to slowly age, oxidise and evaporate. The result is a sweet and savoury tar of considerable complexity. If you haven’t tried a PX sherry, I suggest you do as soon as possible, especially if you’re single.

Finally, the style that the decrepit have made their own, the word that immediately makes people wince in horror at the thought of colostomy bags and bridge…cream. What the hell is cream sherry…that rancid blue bottle of Harvey’s Bristol that you stole and drank when you were 12 years old? Very simply…cream sherry is dry oloroso with a dash of sweet PX. How scary is that? When you know what it is, how it’s made and what an oloroso and a PX taste like separately, cream sherry suddenly starts to become less of a sweet treat and more of a complex, serious tipple, especially when you can taste how the dash of sweet PX brings out the raisiny smokiness of the oloroso. My advice is avoid the bland Harveys Bristol cream and look to something a bit more interesting…otherwise you really do risk looking like an old, spent hag.

If you want to try a food and wine match that’s a real head-melter, try kidneys cooked in a mustard cream (from a cow) sauce with a sweet cream sherry. Your poor wee tongue, all shrivelled up and miserable from the constant abuse of one dimensional, crap sauvignon blancs that are constantly foisted upon it at gatherings in this country won’t know what’s hit it.

Join the club. Become a member of a small band of people who appreciate and love this much maligned style of wine and I guarantee it will open up a completely new chapter in your personal appreciation of all wines. When you’ve bravely tried and enjoyed a late evening glass of old oloroso with some embarrassingly stinking cheese, you begin to develop a real curiosity for the experience of experimental food and wine matching that, unbelievably in some instances…works. Sherry, is a gateway drug well worth getting hooked on. Where it takes you is where every wine lover wants to be.

Try

Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla

The best manzanilla of all, it is a vinous treat that everybody should have a bottle of in the fridge at all times. Dry as camel’s fanny in a sandstorm with green walnut, creamy, soft fruit notes, a fine minerality and a savoury yeasty finish. There are many conflicting flavours balanced beautifully together to create a fresh, fine wine that is a must have with a spread of seafood tapas or just a jar of good, green olives.

$29.90

Gonzalez Byass Del Duque Amontillado Muy Viejo

Aged for 30 years in barrel, the dry Del Duque is a truly memorable amontillado. The oily, rich texture is layered complexity defined. Wave after wave of flavour appears after you’ve swallowed the wine. Running on and on and on, it leaves you yapping like a dog eating chewing gum as you try figure out what’s happening in your mouth. The brine is there with the underlying freshness, but there is an avalanche, of almond, glycerine, baked earth and so much more. Overwhelmingly enjoyable.

$55.00

Barbadillo La Cilla Pedro Ximenez

Ridiculously sticky with intense raisin sweetness front palate; you swallow and it’s like a bomb going off at the back of your throat. Coffee, caramel, chocolate, molasses, rum, savoury black toffee and a rich wave of flavours on a fine, drier finish. A stunning sweet wine and a great gift for an unsuspecting ice cream lover!

$55.00

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