Sherry – a wine for all seasons

Despite its undeserved old-fashioned image, sherry, because it comes in so many styles, is an excellent wine for every occasion, suitable to serve with every course of a meal and with most types of food.

For the aficionado, it is a romantic and complex wine, indeed not one wine, but many- Frances Bissell

Some years ago I was invited to cook the Primera Cena del Jerez at the Casa del Vino in Jerez and was able to demonstrate this.

I planned a menu of British ingredients to partner the wines of the region – smoked venison and Scottish salmon marinated in extra virgin olive oil and fino sherry with crisp finos and manzanillas; with the roast Welsh lamb subtle palo cortados and dry olorosos; with the Stilton and Cheddar sweet oloroso and cream sherries and, following the Continental habit of serving the pudding after the cheese, with my authentic 18th century sherry trifle, based on Hannah Glasse’s recipe, we served the syrupy Pedro Ximenez.

Jerez de la Frontera, El Puerto de Santa Maria, and Sanlucar de Barrameda make up what is known as Spain’s sherry triangle, and it is here, the southernmost corner of Andalucia, and nowhere else, that produces one of the world’s most under-rated wines.

Yet for the aficionado, it is a romantic and complex wine, indeed not one wine, but many, from the pale fresh fino taken at the bar with a sliver of jamon to the decades-old palo cortado one might meditate over in the dim interior of one of the cathedral-like bodegas to be found in the winding streets of Jerez.

The unique process by which sherry is made relies on the solera system, a process of fractional blending in which butts of sherry are stacked on top of each other. Wine is only drawn from the barrel on the bottom, the sol, and the butt is replenished with wine from the one directly above it, and so on.

The topmost butt is replenished with new wine. But each time, only a small proportion of wine is removed or added, so that the new wine is ‘educated’ by what is already there, taking on all the characteristics of the older wine in the butt.

Some houses have been making sherry for so long that some of the series of butts contain a proportion of wine that is very old indeed; we have had some from a barrel whose wine was entered for the 1904 World’s Fair as an old wine.

If these were venerable clarets one would pay a small fortune for them; as it is, the wines of Jerez are considerably underpriced for the quality.

The lightest sherry is fino, of which there are three distinctive styles, depending on which part of the sherry triangle produces it. Fino manzanilla is from Sanlucar, and has a fresh, salty tang of the sea. Fino del Puerto is from Puerto de Santa Maria, and has softer, rounder flavours, said to be brought by the cool breezes from the river, and that from Jerez itself is the classic, pale dry fino, redolent of almonds.

The individual microclimates produce particular yeasts, or flor, which settle on the white wine in barrel, made from the palomino grape, and allow it to undergo a unique biological aging, the flor keeping out the oxygen and retaining the pale crisp dry wine which becomes fino. In some barrels the flor die, oxygen reacts with the wine, which then undergoes an oxida-tive aging, producing the great amontillados and olorosos.

It is a pity to regard fino merely as an aperitif, as it is such a good white wine, and an excellent match for recipes using fish, eggs, cheese, shellfish and vegetables. As its alcohol content is only in the region of 15 per cent, fino is, therefore, relatively fragile, certainly no stronger than many New World Chardonnays and should be treated as wine not a liqueur or spirit.

Serve it very chilled, and, if you have any left, close the bottle with a vacuum pump, refrigerate and use within a day or two. Longer keeping will turn it tired and flabby, and you will lose that glorious crisp, refreshing edge.

It is also important to have a freshly shipped bottle, as fino should ideally be drunk within six months of bottling, and certainly no longer than a year. Some bodegas have an easy to read code on the back, the lot number starting with the year, followed by the day of the year, thus L-11074 will have been bottled on the 74th day of 2011. Unfortunately, some producers do not aim for the same transparency.