Sherry’s raw truths

Every now and then a wine style comes along that seems to capture the imagination of wine geeks and the international sommelier mafia. Word of it spreads, not via marketing campaigns, nor by determined selling to large retailers, but by the most effective means of all: personal recommendation. This was certainly how the Grüner Veltliners of Austria got off the ground, and to a large extent it is behind the current fad for “natural” wines.

I see increasing signs of a similar force behind sherry, particularly what we might call raw sherries. More and more restaurant wine lists now offer a range of sherries by the glass, London is almost awash with sherry and tapas bars, and an increasing number of sherry producers are offering wines for connoisseurs rather than the old mass market brands that used to sell in such quantity.

Sherry fanatic Jesús Barquín and friends’ Equipo Navazos initiative of selecting particularly fine individual casks or butts of sherry to bottle in their numbered La Bota range is one of the key locomotives of the sherry fad. These wines are not cheap, but they are great wines by any standard, as becomes clear when they are shown to wine lovers with food and in proper wine glasses.

But perhaps most heartening of all for a sherry industry that has seen orders plummet, its total vineyard area shrink by two-thirds in the past 20 years, and grape prices shrivel to uneconomic levels, is that mainstream producers are also broadening their range of top-quality sherries. Emilio Lustau has led the field, first with its Almacenista sherries – small lots from small stockholders introduced back in the 1980s – and still with the widest range of individual sherries efficiently distributed around the world.

But now we are seeing a wave of sherries deliberately bottled en rama or raw – direct from under the bready flor yeast that protects light, dry sherries from oxygen and keeps them fresh – but with the difference that the wine is not chilled to stabilise it nor filtered to clarify it, so tastes much more alive and interesting. Barbadillo of Sanlucar was first with its Manzanilla En Rama sold in Spain and now Germany. But in May 2010 González Byass of Jerez, maker of the ubiquitous Tio Pepe fino and also of such admirable dark sherries as Matusalem sweet(ish) oloroso and the intensely nutty Apostoles palo cortado, celebrated its 175th anniversary by bottling 175 cases of a Tio Pepe Fino En Rama and exported the lion’s share to The Wine Society in the UK. They sold out in two hours.

The wine was slightly cloudy but much, much more characterful, and people loved it. And now others are following suit. An En Rama bottling of Javier Hidalgo’s La Gitana Manzanilla is about to be launched in the UK, while Argueso has also produced a Manzanilla En Rama and producers in the Andalusian Montilla region, Alvear and Delgado, also bottle En Rama wines. These wines are quite fragile and it is recommended that they are consumed within six months of bottling.

In late September I was invited to help choose the barrels to go into a new range of En Rama sherries from González Byass, the Palmas range. This is to be a limited annual edition of bottlings such as Tio Pepe En Rama but of much older wines. Fino Una Palma is six-year-old flor-covered wine from its fino-amontillado solera (or set of barrels); Dos Palmas eight-year-old fino; Tres Palmas one cask of 10-year-old wine where there is practically no protective flor yeast left; and Cuatro Palmas is just half a cask’s worth of particularly rare wine from its six-cask solera of 40-year-old amontillado. Prices range from £12 to £50 per half litre, labelled with facsimiles of labels from the Victorian era when Mr Byass was busily flogging Sr González’s light, dry wines from Jerez around Britain.

What was particularly exciting was to be reminded of the extraordinarily strong character of sherry and sherry bodegas. The González Byass headquarters in Jerez is centred on an old Andalucian homestead that has surely hardly changed in more than a century – except perhaps to remove the antimacassars – and houses an exceptional archive of the sherry business. I wandered through the portrait-lined entrance hall, past a well-polished grandfather clock and then suddenly got a great, heady whiff of sherry wafting in from one of the many bodegas.

It was a great learning experience to taste cask after cask of possible ingredients in the final blends for these four new wines with González Byass’s head winemaker Antonio Flores, born to his predecessor virtually over the small bodega where Tio Pepe (Uncle Joe) was initially developed. The exercise made me realise just why Jesús Barquín and colleagues make their selections for La Bota bottlings from single casks. There were such marked differences in the wine even from adjacent casks containing wine of exactly the same age and provenance. The amount of flor yeast left on the top of each cask varied enormously, presumably partly because of precisely where they were in the high ceilinged bodega, the condition of the barrel and so on.

Una Palma is pungent, floral and fresh with an apple-like aroma – like Tio Pepe En Rama with a bit more depth and density. Dos Palmas has the most wonderful combination of lemon oil and almonds and really is a big step up from the Una Palma in my view. The Tres Palmas is much darker and more pungent, with hints of a past under flor and strong amontillado notes, a blend of my favourite cask and Antonio’s slightly more austere favourite. The Cuatro Palmas is more of a curiosity. Once sherry gets this old it can be very demanding; some of the really old wines we tasted were almost bitter. The final wine chosen was Antonio’s favourite cask that smelt of toffee and peaches and above all the aged austerity of a fino that has lost its flor and turned into an amontillado.

The plan is to have just one autumn bottling each year of these Palmas sherries to complement the spring Tio Pepe En Rama bottling. I do hope top-quality sherry is here to stay.