I can’t tell you how many retailers told me that I shouldn’t write about sherry because, in so many words, people just don’t care about it. True, that, to an extent — but whose fault is that? Or rather, how much of the problem is that very few retailers have really gotten behind sherry?

The reason, I think, is that too few of them have been fortunate enough to have that almost-religious experience that Ryan Opaz and Annette Peters talk about: sampling fresh sherry in its homeland.

I was one of the lucky ones. It was during my Navy days, in the train station in the town of Jerez (Spanish for “sherry”).  I had about an hour’s layover between Seville and Rota, and like a good sailor I headed to the bar, where two utter revelations awaited.

The sardines being served as tapas were extraordinary, even by Mediterranean seafood standards, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to what we got on these shores at the time. Same with the fino sherry, truly a nectar of the deities and an obscenely apt complement to the salty, briny sardines. Sheer Nirvana.

OK, enough about me. The rest of this post is for geeks. Not (necessarily) for wine geeks, but for science geeks. In the print-edition piece, I went about as far as I dared into the actual winemaking process. Here’s more on that from Peters:

“The barrels reduce naturally with oxidation and then the barrels are ‘topped up’ 5/6ths of the way with either sherry from the Craidera above or new wines.  With Finos this is a very delicate process as they do it with a special sprinkler that doesn’t disrupt the flor [a naturally-occuring film of yeast which protects the sherry from
oxygen].

“So the wine is always moving down and last drawn from barrels on the floor. The word Solera comes from the Latin — Solaria meaning ‘the soil,’ so Solera ‘from the soil.’  Often confused with something referencing the sun.  Also, the building that sherry is made in is called the Solera.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.