Winecast: Sherry, Part I

Hello everybody and welcome to the WineCast. For some time now, I've been receiving requests to do a cast on Sherry, and I finally found some time to really tackle the subject. I'm excited about this cast, but full disclosure in advance, Sherry is a complicated wine style and it's going to take a couple of casts to do it right. So, you guessed it, this cast will be part one of a two-part cast, and this one will talk about Sherry's identity as a wine style along with its history, a bit about the wine law governing its production, and then the specifics of the climate and soils in the region where the grapes for it are grown, while part two is going to look in detail at the method of production for Sherry and the different styles into which it can be made. There's a lot to cover, so let's get started. The wine that drinkers think of when they think of Sherry today has a fairly specific and complex definition, with a fair number of moving parts to it. Essentially, it's a fortified wine made from a particular set of grapes grown in the Jerez region of southern Spain that usually undergoes aging and blending in a series of casks called a solera, and the aging and blending must be done in a specific part of Jerez. Each of these deserves a closer look, so let's start with the region. Wines that are properly and legitimately called Sherry are from Spain, specifically from Jerez on the south-southeastern Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula. The region is actually closely associated with three towns, the eponymous and El Puerto de Santa Maria, that are often referred to as making up the Sherry Triangle, an area roughly triangular in shape that we'll look at in more detail later, associated with the aging of Sherry and falling within the larger Jerez region. There's also another region, a separate DO or denomination of origin, about a hundred miles away from Jerez, called Montilla That's important to Sherry production because, uniquely for a region working in the European Union quality framework, a particular sweet style of Sherry can be made from grapes grown in Montilla and exported to Jerez for production and aging, and still receive the Jerez designation, even though that's not where the grapes came from. Viticulture in this area goes back a very long way, with evidence for it at least as early as the 900s BC, when vines may have been brought to the region by Phoenician traders. The name for the region and for its most famous wine, Sherry, has a complex history too, being an anglicization of a local Arabic place name, Sherish, that itself was probably an attempt by Muslim rulers of the area during the Middle Ages to pronounce an even older and possibly Phoenician place name. This explains how the English name for the wine and region ended up with a sh sound at the beginning of it, and it's also the reason behind the curious French spelling for this word that begins with the letter x. The x was an attempt by writers of medieval Spanish to come up with a letter to represent the sh sound, a sound that isn't native to Spanish, and that over time drifted to a h sound represented by the letter j in the current Spanish pronunciation, Jerez. The French picked up the word when it was still spelled with an x, and, fun fact, their pronunciation of it drifted as well, and I'm told that it's more of a j sound than a sh sound now. So, curiously, the only European language that still pronounces the name more or less like it was originally pronounced is English, with the pronunciation Sherry. Go fig. Speaking of the English, they've been very important to the history of Sherry indeed, and can be fairly described as among this style's biggest fans. The English had become involved with the Spanish wine trade by the mid-1300s, and that trade involved wines from Jerez, as well as from other areas of southern Spain, that became known as sacs, a term that you'll still hear connected to Sherry from time to time. The term's origin isn't completely clear, and it may come from the Spanish word seco, that means dry, suggesting that the first wines imported from this and other Spanish regions were dry wines. And while that's an interesting possibility, it's more likely that it comes from the Spanish verb sacar, that means to remove, and was probably a term picked up by English merchants who overheard Spanish merchants referring to their wines as being removed or exported to England. Though there's a related term, sacca, from the same verb that's used in connection to the Solera system that we'll talk about later, sac isn't related to that since it was in use centuries before the Solera system was developed. And, despite the occasional marketing gimmick, the word definitely isn't related to the English word sac as in bag. Sac was a common term for wines from this region, but the term Sherry was in use around the same time as sac, and eventually became the dominant term by the latter 1600s, and it remains so today. Though the English began trading for wine with the Spanish in the 1300s, wines from Jerez got a boost in popularity when Sir Francis Drake conducted a famous raid on the in 1587, and, according to some sources anyway, captured 2900 pipes, or 650 liter barrels, of local wine and took them with him to England. Though these wines enchanted the English, it's important to remember that wines from Jerez then were very different in character from what we think of as Sherry today, and while they were probably fortified with a distilled spirit to keep them from spoiling during transport, they were made from dozens of different local grape varieties, including both red and white grapes, and aging the wines in a solera, or that network of barrels that I mentioned earlier, wasn't done until the 1700s. And on top of that, references to biological aging, or aging under a layer of yeast called flore, that gives Fino and Manzanilla Sherries their distinct sensory profile, doesn't appear until the mid 1700s or so either. These practices were fully in place though by 1933, when the Jerez region received its own DO, specifically for the production of wine in the style that we've been describing, that is, fortified, solera-aged wine. An important sub-region of Jerez, Manzanilla Sanlúcar de Barrameda, was recognized with its own DO in 1964, though it already had a set of separate production standards recognized for itself when the Jerez DO was granted in 1933. Other wines can be and are made in the region, but unless they meet the requirements specific to these DOs, they don't have access to the Jerez, or Manzanilla designations. Speaking of designations, the Jerez region is divided into two zones, and these zones need some unpacking to make sense out of them. The zones are called the Zona de Producción, or Zone of Production, and the Zona de Crianza, or Zone of Maturation or Aging. The Zona de Producción, or Production Zone, covers the entire region of Jerez, and grapes for Jerez DO wines can be made in designated vineyard sites throughout the area. It's also possible to produce wine throughout this area, but that wine won't have access to the Jerez designation, in other words, it won't be sherry, unless that wine is matured in a smaller zone, the Zona de Crianza. The Zona de Crianza is a limited area, or more accurately, a group of areas, around the three towns of the Sherry Triangle, Sanlúcar, Jerez, and Puerto de Santa María. The triangle outline I've drawn is actually a bit misleading, because the zone isn't triangle-shaped exactly, but it's confined to the municipal boundaries of each of the three towns, and for a wine to receive the Jerez designation and be legitimate sherry, it has to undergo aging within one of those areas around one of those towns, and for a wine to be a manzanilla, it has to undergo aging in the area around the town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Wines made and or aged outside of the Zona de Crianza, like this famous local sweet red wine, Tintilla de Rota, made from a local variety of Graciano, can identify themselves as being from Jerez, but they don't have access to the Jerez DO designation, and thus they aren't sherry. Together, the Zona de Producción and the Zona de Crianza are collectively known as the Marco de Jerez, the traditional name for the region. So much for the history and at least some of the wine law for this region, but what's it like to grow grapes there? Well, the Jerez region is around 36 degrees north latitude, about the same latitude as Las Vegas in the United States, and that's fairly far south compared to much of Europe, so it gets hot down there, and in addition to hot, it also gets both dry and humid. Why both? Because Jerez is affected by two important wind systems, the first being the poniente, a west wind that's both cool and humid and that helps keep temperatures moderate, at least for part of the growing season. The humidity brought by this wind also helps promote the development of flora, or the yeast veil that forms on some sherries, and is a key to their style. But the region can also get hit by the levante, a fierce and intense east wind that's both hot and dry, and that can be a hazard to vines. These vines are planted on three different types of soil that are worth getting to know. The first and most important of these is albariza, a bright white colored chalk-based soil that's rich in limestone. Because of the high chalk content, as much as 80% of a given patch of the soil can be chalk, in fact, it's exceptionally good at absorbing and thus retaining water, something that's necessary through the long and often extremely hot growing season, thanks to the latitude and the levante. This soil is dazzlingly white, and that white color gives it a high albedo, or reflectance value, that not only helps it stay cool and thus resist evaporation of the water that it's storing, but also helps it to re-radiate solar energy to the vines planted on it to assist in ripening. A very large majority of the plantings in Jerez, over 90% in fact, are planted on this soil, but it's not a very fertile soil. More fertile is a dark, clake-based soil called barro, that can produce higher yields from the vines planted on it, but grapes produced on this soil haven't typically been associated with high quality. And there's a similar story for the last soil type, arena, a sandy soil that contains clay as well, and that, like barro, can produce high yields, but not necessarily high quality grapes. However, for one of the three authorized grape varieties for sherry production, muscatel, this soil is considered able to produce very high quality grapes. And finally, what are the grapes authorized for sherry? Though like I mentioned, there used to be dozens of different grapes, both red and white, grown in the region and used in its wines, the phylloxera epidemic of the late 19th century offered growers the chance to replant their vineyards in favor of vines that worked best with the style of solera-aged sherry that was emerging around the same time. So, while there's still a number of varieties grown in the region that can be used in non-DO wines, only three grapes, all white, are authorized for sherry production, the most important of which is palomino. Palomino is a low-acid grape with very neutral flavors and aromas, and that makes it a perfect grape to go through the solera process that we'll talk about in the next cast, because that process imparts a very specific set of sensory characteristics to wines, and a neutral grape like palomino doesn't have aggressive flavors or aromas that get in the way of the ones imparted by solera aging. The consensus is that palomino grows best on the Albariza soils in Jerez, and it's far and away the dominant grape in the region, making up around 98% of total plantings. Muscatel, which can refer to either Muscata Patigran or Muscat of Alexandria, is used either by itself in the production of a sweet style of sherry, or to sweeten certain styles of sherry, and it isn't widely planted, making up just a little over one percent of total plantings in the region. Smallest in terms of plantings is Pedro Ximenez, a grape that was formerly widely planted in the area, but thanks to its susceptibility to rot and other humidity- related diseases, is now rarely planted in Jerez, making up less than one percent of plantings. Despite its limited plantings, this grape is very important to the production of a very specific style of dessert sherry that shares its name with the grape, Pedro Ximenez, or PX for short. How can it be so important with such a limited number of vines? As I mentioned before, uniquely for the European Union, Pedro Ximenez grapes can be imported from the relatively nearby and drier region of Montilla, Moriles, and be made into wine in Jerez that receives the sherry designation. Thanks for joining me for another wine cast. This one was a pretty technical affair, but I hope it was still both accessible and enjoyable, as well as helpful. What's on the agenda for the next cast? The plan is to take a look at the production methods for sherry, with a special focus on how the Solera system operates, and then to get a sense for the range of styles that can be produced under the heading of sherry, as well as talking about the sensory properties and characteristics that each of these styles has to offer, so be on the lookout for that cast. If this cast was enjoyable and helpful to you, please like and subscribe if you haven't already, and please always feel free to share your thoughts and questions in the comments. I'm your host, the Unknown Winecaster, and I'm out! Enjoy the grape, but always enjoy it responsibly.