Sherry

Forget the granny connotation - sherry is the trendiest drink out there, says Adam Lechmere, and if you just give it a try you’re bound to discover why

Over the last few years, sherry has become the hot topic among the London wine cognoscenti. There are new sherry and tapas bars opening every month,
many of them having comprehensive sherry lists as their USPs. We can’t get enough of them, from the brilliant, tiny Bar Pepito, in King’s Cross, to the hip Capote y Toros in Kensington.

‘Sherry has become cool,’ Richard Bigg, the force behind Pepito, told me. ‘Anyone who’s serious about wine is nuts about sherry.’ But there’s the rub. If you could appreciate the huge range of styles this magnifi cent drink is capable of, from an aged oloroso to a palo cortado, you’d be hooked. But who, beyond the city-dwelling elite, really gets the chance?

‘This is delicious,’ said one of my fellow guests at a party I’d taken half a dozen sherries to, ‘but I just never get round to buying them myself.’ They have never considered the idea that sherry is ‘the new black’, as Bigg put it to me, because they never really consider sherry at all.

Sherry is a fortified wine produced exclusively in the extreme south west of Spain, in the region around Jerez de la Frontera. The majority are made from the palomino grape, blended from soleras, groups of barrels containing wines of different ages. As the wines age, they remain intensely dry and light in colour, or darken and take on different qualities, depending on the presence or otherwise of a yeast called flor, which sits on the surface of the wine.

There are four main styles, in order of sweetness: fi no or manzanilla, amontillado, palo cortado and oloroso. Fino is produced exclusively under the cap of fl or, without any oxygen. It should be dry and fresh. Manzanilla is a fi no made in the village of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, one of three villages within the sherry appellation. The last three are the result of varying levels of fl or in the ageing process, resulting in wines that are darker, very slightly sweeter and fuller in the mouth.

The ‘cream style’ – and this is where your granny and her dusty bottle of Harveys comes into the story – can also be called amontillado, but it’s not true amontillado, it’s fino made accessible with the addition of cheap sweet wines. It is to proper sherry what Nescafé is to real coffee.

The only naturally sweet sherries are those made from the pedro ximénez grape. The other styles can be characterised by their weight – consider the fullness of an oloroso to a fino – and their aromas. While fino is reminiscent of almonds, amontillado brings to mind hazelnuts, and oloroso walnuts. Remember too that sherry is made on the Atlantic coast: its range is salty, not sweet. Some afi cionados, notably Heston Blumenthal, believe in an umami element to sherry – I’d see that as lying somewhere between ocean salinity and nuttiness.

If you can’t get to a bar like Pepito, Waitrose and Majestic have good sherry ranges to enjoy at home. Start dry, then experiment gradually. And drink them with food – it’s only Harveys that is meant to be drunk alone, like cough medicine.