Allow me to make a small wager with you. I’ll bet the last sherry you were served was about ten years ago, prior to a forgetable meal at a wedding reception centre. I’ll bet it was dark in colour, unpalatably sweet and cloying. You thought it was terrible, and reminding yourself that sherry was only fit for retired professors, park-bench winos and grandmothers, swore never to touch the stuff again. Something like that, was it? I’d have done the same myself if I thought that’s all there was to sherry. For sherries are misunderstood, like John McEnroe, John Hewson, and Jesus Christ before him. And for the simple, logical reason that hardly anyone understands them, nobody drinks them anymore. What a tragedy! Some of the most interesting, flavoursome wines of all, many of them fabulous with food, are indeed sherries. Sherry is unique. It is a still, fortified wine that depends to a large extent on extracting flavour from a yeast, known as flor. Many wines sold as ‘sherry’ in Australia today aren’t fit to polish a Spanish dining-table, let alone be served at it. This is because the essence of sherries (especially the drier styles) is their distinct bready-nuttiness, only acquired by the presence of the floating scum of the flor yeast inside the barrels in which it is aged. The nasty, cheapest Australian ‘sherries’ are frequently made without flor yeast growth, and in my mind can only be likened to light, grapey (and frequently excessively sweet) fortified wines. Like tawny ports, sherry doesn’t show years as such. The wines are multi-blended in a solera, an intricate blending system which imparts those almost magical qualities which enable sherry to be absolutely consistent every year. No matter how good or poor the last vintage, the wine drawn off at the end of the blending system will be imperceptibly different to that taken last time. There’s a great little piece from Diamonds are Forever, which went something like this: BOND: (when served expensive fino sherry) Sixty-six, I believe? M: Good Lord, Bond, don’t you know that sherries don’t have years? BOND: I meant the start of the solera, sir. Eighteen sixty-six, I think.you’ll find. M: Mmmpppffff Game, set and match to Bond. The cellars, or bodegas where the blending and maturation takes place, are huge cavernous halls, filled with tall, lengthy, but ordered piles of barrels. The top layer of the solera is called the ‘criadera’, or nursery, into which the new and youngest wine is poured, to fill about 80% of the barrel. But to achieve this, some wine must be removed from these casks, and transferred to those in the layer below, which themselves have been partially emptied to receive the younger wine. Like a falling line of dominos, this effect is continued down through all the layers of the solera, leaving the oldest wine to be drawn from the barrels in the bottom layer, out from the solera and into the bottle. All sherry, no matter how it finally appears, is made initially as a bone-dry wine. After being fortified to 15% by volume, it is decanted into old wooden casks. The bung is loose-fitting and allows free movement of air in either direction. The flor yeast grows spontaneously over the wine’s surface within the barrel, protecting it from rapid and excessive oxidation. Quite by chance, different barrels of the same wine will produce different thicknesses of flor growth. Light and delicate wines with a heavy growth of flor yeast, and a stronger nutty ‘sherry’ character, are destined to be made to fino sherries. Those slightly heavier, but still with good flor growth may become amontillado sherries. Amontillados can also be made by leaving fino sherries for longer periods in casks, enabling them to gain in body and develop in volume of flavour and bouquet. Other young sherries which show little or no disposition towards the flor tend to be darker, fuller and slightly coarser wines that lack the subtle delicacy of the fino styles. There are earmarked to become olorosos, and are fully fortified earlier than finos to protect them against oxidation and allow them to mature in the cool cellars for long periods. Once taken from the casks, the sherries are fortified to their final alcoholic level of at least 17%. Some are sweetened before bottling with ‘vino de color’, a concentration of grape juice, which also darkens the sherry. Finos are the lightest, driest and most delicate of all. Best drunk while they still retain their youthful freshness and zing, they are not cellaring wines at all. In fact, once open they only stay fresh for a few weeks. So keep one in the fridge door – they last longer and taste better that way. Serve finos as aperitifs and as accompaniments to pickled seafoods, tangy salads and antipasto. As dry as the Gobi Desert, they are the ultimate aperitif. Deeper and more amber in colour, being slightly less nutty than finos, amontillado sherries are sometimes dry but are usually slightly sweet. Try amontillados at the dinner table, with vegetable broths and meaty winter casseroles and stews. They take mulligatawny to an art form. Oloroso is Spanish for ‘fragrant’. The wines are very intense and concentrated, fuller-bodied than amontillados and extremely vinous and ‘fat’. Their great richness can be easily mistaken for sweetness. The most alcoholic of the sherries, they can acquire over 23% alcohol by volume with age. Although some try matching their strong flavour with food, I think they are best suited to uncorking after the meal. Dry olorosos are rare enough to be museum pieces, for they are most commonly quite sweet. To try some brilliant Australian sherry, look for these labels; the Seppeltsfield ‘DP’ series, the Lindemans Classic Releases and those from Talavera, a small proprietary brand. Next month we may take a fascinating peep at some variations on the sherry theme.
