© Fedejerez

About the author: Bonnie Graves is a journalist, sommelier and wine consultant based in Los Angeles. Her writing outlets include Yahoo!, Luxury Life & Style, Corkd and others. She also designs and implements beverage programs for hotels and restaurants across the country. When not working with wine, Graves enjoys hiking in National Parks with her family.

© Fedejerez

© Fedejerez

SHERRY: A NEW LOOK AT SPAIN'S MOST COMPLEX WINE By Bonnie Graves is potent. Sherry and Port wines also share a common problem: protecting their unique products by protecting their place-names as brands. While you can still find loads of wines, usually on the cooking aisle by the balsamic vinegar, that are labeled as “sherry” or “port,” these wines are misleading because they do not come from either Spain or Portugal. Recently, Fedejerez (Federación de Bodegas del Marco de Jerez) has partnered with winemakers in Oporto and in Champagne to aggressively protect the term “sherry” as wines that must come from the Sherry triangle in Spain. Real Sherry comes from a very specific place in southern Spain, just like real Champagne comes from the Champagne region in France and real Port wines come from Portugal and not from, say, a manufacturing plant in central California.

That Sherry wines face marketing threats from impos-
ters is only half the problem: the bigger issue is con-
sumer confusion about authentic Sherries, which range
from delicately pale and saline finos to caramel-inflected
olorosos to syrupy-raisiny dessert wines made from the
Pedro Ximénez grape, a treat that locals pour on ice
cream as we would do with hot fudge. Absolutely no
other wine-producing region in the world is quite as
maddening to master and yet the rewards are consider-
able. (Wine geeks love Sherry, and I have gradually
transformed into a zealot over the years.) Most Sherry
wines start out from the fairly pedestrian palomino
grape, which thrives in the chalky soils and searing
climate of southerly Cádiz. This limestone and calcium-
carbonate soil is called albariza, which is bright white
in color and which has a remarkable ability to retain
water like a thirsty sponge. Similarly, the ameliorating
winds from the nearby Atlantic are key to the region’s
viticultural traditions and to its cuisine. Sherry wines
While most wine experts routinely cite the Sherry wines
of southern Spain as offering incredible value, these
fortified wines remain largely unappreciated and mis-
understood in the U.S. Part of this is due to the crushing
success of the Harvey’s “Bristol Cream” brand, which
has dominated the American market for decades and
created an assumption that Sherry is a super-sweet,
low-quality product for folks of an older generation.
Similarly, Sherry wines are sometimes associated with
British pretentiousness, as the UK remains the largest
market for these wines outside of Spain itself. As a
freshman at Harvard, I was “put up” for the Signet
Society of Arts and Letters, a social audition of sorts,
and it was at their introductory cocktail party that I was
first served a tiny glass of fino by an aspiring young
gent whose terribly fake British accent was rivaled only
by his bad taste in thrift store smoking jackets. I passed
on hanging out with that crowd, but also passed on
Sherry for years and it was the latter and not the former
that proved a real loss.