The inexorable decline of sherry?
I HAVE been pondering two recent ex- periences of sherry which are very hard to reconcile. The other day I took part in a big fino tasting at Decanter magazine — one of those clinical events in a room like a laboratory where everything is tasted blind and one feels one should be wearing a white coat, like those actors pretending to be scientists in commercials — and it was acutely depressing. There were a number of people present who love sherry, and the faces grew longer and longer as we sniffed and spat our way through the 31 wines (from shared glasses, by the way — no Aids nonsense in the wine world). The company seemed almost too grieved to speak at first, but then the less repressible of us began to give vent to our feelings. Dustiness, lack of freshness, unmistakable traces of moscatel and mistela on the nose; unpleasantly high acidity and heaviness on the palate: many of these wines did not taste like fino at all. The manzanillas were even more disappointing: hardly any seemed to possess the highly-strung salty freshness one expects from the wine of Sanhicar de Barrameda.
The other experience took place a month or two earlier. Admittedly the circumstances were very different, more propitious possibly: it was Holy Week in Seville rather than midweek in St John's Hill, and each evening began with a round of sherry and tapa bars. Copitas of fino, deliciously cool and fresh with the scent of for, the price (40p or so, double the usual price) marked up on the bar in front of one in white chalk. On Easter Sunday, lunch in Triana in a shell-fish bar: a half-bottle (such a useful measure) of text-book man- zanilla (La Gitana) quickly followed by a second half-bottle (much cooler than half a full bottle would have been), and no ill-effects afterwards despite the already blazing Sevillian sun. I swear that not a glass of the sherry I drank in Seville was dusty, lacking in freshness or tainted by moscatel. So what is the answer? How can these two sides belong to the same coin? Lack of freshness in fino sherry in this country is not a new problem: merchants have often found that a second shipment of a sherry they have selected precisely for its freshness has had to be returned because it has gone stale and dull — but where?
Most of the bottling lines in Jerez are as new and high-tech as any in the world, so
that should not be the problem. One explanation for the maddening variability of this, at best, marvellous drink is that fino sherry ferments anaerobically, pro- tected from the oxygen in the atmosphere by its covering layer of for. The result is that, like a person who has taken too many antibiotics, it lacks resistance to bacteria. The traditional solution to this vulnerabil- ity has been to beef fino up with alcohol. For good reason, the trend is now against this: more and more people, who have perhaps been to southern Spain on holi- day, want their fino to taste light and fresh, as it does in Andalucia. That is all very well, but the sherry one drinks in Andalu- cia has not had to travel 1500 miles. One of the Decanter panel suggested that every bottle of sherry should carry a date of bottling, like the 'best by' dates which the more reputable wine-boxes now sport.
The fact remains that the sherry mer- chants need to do something to restore the reputation of a product which wine writers keep insisting is one of the world's great wines, but which the public seems less and less willing to buy. Sherry sales have been declining, slowly but inexorably, for the last five years. In the belief that it is all a question of image (middle-aged, boring), Harvey's brought out Tico, the light mixer sherry. Sherry is an exciting drink, but its genuine attractions will not appear to best advantage when mixed with Coca-Cola and served in a disco. Much more encouraging to me has been the introduction of Har- vey's premium 1796 range. Here are some top quality dry sherries (they could poss- ibly be drier still) selling for f5-£6 — hardly extortionate these days when the most basic of Chablis costs nearly E7 — and showing the world a complexity and beauty of flavour which the mass of neutral clean dry white wine does not even approach.
I have to say that of the 1796 sherries the best are not the Fino or even the Manza- nilla (good though that is, albeit in a soft, somewhat atypical style), but the Old Amontillado and the Palo Cortado. Read- ers of Edgar Allan Poe will know that amontillado can be the most refined and exquisite of sherries, quite unlike the average supermarket medium, and this Harvey's example has a long, lingering flavour reminiscent of the essence of wal- nuts.
Ausonius
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