Greetings and a Happy New Year to you. I trust you had a good old party to see in 2014, enjoying all the wonderful booze that you’ve read about over the past few years in these pages. Personally, I was enjoying a nice glass of whisky on the big day, watered down with tears mourning England’s spectacular loss in the Ashes. I honestly don’t think there is a strong enough drink on Earth to help erase the memory of some of those performances... Over the last two months, I’ve seen batting and bowling displays that I can’t unsee. Thankfully, there is a long time before we have to face that contest again.

I wrote on the global spirits focus in the last issue of Indulge (if you haven’t seen it yet, you must check it out) that 2013 was a year of adventure for me, both physically in visiting new spirits producers across the globe and in trying new products. Some of them were utterly groundbreaking in their approach to making spirits.

Those adventures continue in the new year, and as my first trip of 2014 I hopped on a flight to southern Spain to experience the making of sherry.

Those eagle-eyed readers will note that sherry is not a spirit. It is very much a wine but with a twist—sherry is a fortified wine, which means that it has a spirit that is fortified by adding another eau de vie made from grapes before its maturation.

Unlike many wines (or indeed spirits that come from grapes) that can use a variety of different grapes in their production, sherry must, with two notable exceptions, be made from the white Palomino grape, grown in the Jerez de la Frontera region of Andalusia in Spain.

The two notable exceptions to this rule are the darkly delicious Pedro Ximénez (or PX as it is often known) and the slightly lighter Moscatel versions, both of which have been aged long in oak barrels and exposed to air, giving them a nearly treacle-like sweet character. Think of taking the biggest, boldest red wine you know and adding a spoonful or two of rich, runny honey. That’s what you get with a PX sherry. A small glass is required, as a result.

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A layer of flor seen developing inside a barrel of sherry. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

For me, both of these styles have their place, with a Fino or a Manzanilla style perfect on a hot Spanish day, and the darker styles such as PX perfect with a rich, fruity dessert and a cigar at the end of a long evening.

Needless to say, the trip was jam-packed with events that proved to be educational tours about the production of sherry. For example, the wines produced from the Palomino grape are aged in oak barrels before a grape-based spirit is added to them after fermentation. To produce a Fino sherry, the alcohol content of the wine is taken up to 15.5% by volume in the cask. This allows for a yeast-like growth, known as flor, to develop on top of the maturing liquid and inhibits its oxidation, maintaining its light colour and dry flavour. However, sherries of a darker appearance are boosted again by the addition of a grape-based spirit, so the alcohol content goes up to 17% by volume. At this strength, flor cannot develop and the sherry is oxidized slightly as it ages, giving it a darker colour and a sweeter note.

On first appearance, if one were to compare a Fino with an Oloroso-style sherry, you would think one came from a white grape and the other from a red grape (in the same style as red and white wine), but that’s not the case. It is simply due to the oxidization of the liquid inside the barrel.

Sadly, sherry isn’t one of the world’s most loved drinks. In the past 20 years, it has seen a sharp decline in sales from what wasn’t anyway a particularly large sales base to start with. Fuelled by vicious price wars and—dare I say—a contraction in quality, sherry has fallen off the radar for many wine and spirits lovers, which is a shame as a good sherry—for example, the Tío Pepe produced by the González Byass house—is a perfectly good introduction to dry Fino.

However, I do have a confession to make... As much as the trip was a fantastic education into the world of sherry (and I would encourage people who haven’t tried a Fino against a PX to head to their nearest well-stocked bar and have a go), it held another purpose: to find about the casks used in the production of sherry. Why? Because these are the key to maturing many of the world’s finest whiskies.

In next month’s edition, I’ll be focusing more on the flavour that ex-sherry casks add to whiskies. It is one of the most important things, so much so that a global luxury brand such as The Macallan single-malt Scotch whisky relies on maturing nearly 100% of its products in these casks. This is quite an effort, when you consider that ex-sherry casks cost nearly 10 times that of any other style of oak casks.

I hope you’ll join me next month to discover why these casks are so important in the production of whiskies from The Macallan to Johnnie Walker and Chivas Regal, and why whisky makers in Scotland, Ireland and Japan are so reliant on their friends in Spain... Until then, Happy New Year.

Joel Harrison is a drinks writer and consultant and co-founder of the website Caskstrength.net. He is on Twitter at @WeHeartWhisky

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