"O monstrous, but one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack". So lamented Shakespeare's Prince Hal whilst reading the tavern bill of the loquacious and bawdy drunkard Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV part 1. The cost of two gallons of sack or sherri (sic) in those days was a mere 5s 8d.
Sherry, together with Port and Claret are still seen as archetypical English wines. Claret sales are relatively stable at the present, whilst Port is making a steady recovery but is still drunk mostly at Christmas. But what of Sherry?
Sherry comes from the region in southern Spain around the town of Jerez de la Frontera, originally named Xera by the earliest Phoenician settlers who brought the vine with them around 1100BC.
Viciously fought over by successive invading Roman, Visigoth and Moorish armies, Jerez's diverse cultural identity is amply illustrated in its architecture, cuisine, in its inhabitants temperament, and no more so than in its twenty centuries of documented winemaking practices.
Wine making, particularly distilling wine into spirits for medical use flourished, with the first accurately recorded exports, or saca's (the Arabic derivation of Sack) in the 14 th and 15 th Centuries. However it was not until 18 th that both British and Dutch traders seriously discovered the pale dry wines of Jerez, some even basing themselves in the town thus creating the household name brands like Harvey, Croft, Osborne and Williams and Humbert to name but a few.
Most Sherry, 97%, is made using a somewhat ordinary white grape variety, the Palomino a relative of the Riesling. The most favoured vineyards are located on soil to the north and west of Jerez named the Superior Zone, being very rich in chalky calcium carbonate known as Albariza. The distinctive white soil holds the early season rainfall, enabling the vines to flourish during the searing 40c heat of the summer growing season.
Once harvested, the delicate, thin-skinned Palomino is gently squeezed using a pneumatic cushion press, so as not to include the skins, seeds or stems in the wine. From this initial pressing, the "yema", comes around 80% of the juice used to make the lightest and most delicate Fino Sherry.
To begin the winemaking process, a natural yeast, which occurs locally, known as "pie de cuba" is added to the juice. After 45-50 days the juice has fermented into wine, but is not yet Sherry. An initial classification, taken after rigorous scientific analysis and subjective tasting and perusal by expert winemakers, grades the wine as either a potential Fino, the finest, or as an Oloroso, the most fragrant. Fino's are then fortified with grape spirit to 15 degrees of alcohol, whilst the Oloroso's are strengthened to 18 degrees alcohol. Both are then put into cask. A year later another analysis establishes which Fino's are thought to have evolved more like Olorosos, these are then re-fortified to the higher alcohol level.
It is then, in the idiosyncratic maturing system of Solera y Criadera that the true magic of Sherry really begins. After fortification, each year's wine is placed on the top level, or criadera of barrels in the maturing cellar, the bodega.
To facilitate this, around 30% of the wine in the bottom layer of barrels, known as the solera, is removed for bottling. The resulting space is then filled with wine from the next level up, and so on until the new years wine can be added to the top level, thereby refilling all the barrels. In this way, a perfect blending system is maintained, and constant quality and supply is carefully balanced.
During this ageing and blending system, a thin layer of "flor", a yeasty veil covers the surface of the wine in each barrel. Flor is peculiar to this region, and helps to impart the complex nutty aromas and clean, crisp bite synonymous with Fino Sherry. Originally, during some of the earliest exports of Sherry, the wine was thought to be faulty due to the yeasty deposits in each cask. With many years of expert winemaking behind them Jerez's producer's have harnessed the evocative influence of flor to make a unique wine.
The largest producers of Fino Sherry are the Gonzales Byass company, established in 1835 by Don Manuel Maria Gonzales Angel. Via his London agent Robert Blake Byass, eventually to become a partner in the business, Manuel Maria was the first to export the delicately light, pale Fino style Sherry to England, whose consumers were more used to a sweetened richer style.
Today Tio Pepe, named after a favourite "Uncle Joe" is not only the biggest selling Fino Sherry in the world, but is Spain's largest selling product world-wide.
Following the fall in popularity of Sherry since its heyday in the 1960's and 70's, much is being done to re-establish the clean, fruity, nutty Fino style as a serious competitor in the dry white wine market. With alcohol levels of some oak aged chardonnay and semillon wines now reaching 14.5%, the strength of Fino at 15% is seen to be comparable.
Freshly marketed in fashionably sleek green glass bottles, with sharp informative labelling, Tio Pepe looks comparable to other crisp dry white wines on the off license or supermarket shelf.
It is however the compatibility with food that Fino Sherry comes into its own. Gonzales Byass have also commissioned scientists to evaluate the effect that Fino has on the palate prior to the consumption of food, a fact that I can heartily vouch for.
It's time for us UK wine drinkers to reclaim Sherry for our own. Whether
it be a cool, clean glass of Fino with tapas, mixed with tonic water
as a long refreshing lunchtime tipple, or a succulently sweet glass of
pure, dark Pedro Ximinez to accompany a chocolate dessert Sherry deserves
to regain its prestigious mantle once again, Sante!
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