Sherry is among the most singular wines available today.
Consider manzanilla, a type of fino sherry, which we have been examining in Wine School over the last month. While some wines may occasionally be reminiscent of manzanilla, none offers the combination of briny salinity, almondlike nuttiness and dried flower aromas and flavors that can snap even the most jaded palate to attention.
Some people, like me, adore these savory flavors. We go out of our way to find reasons to drink manzanilla. Other people will do whatever is necessary to avoid the bracing onslaught of what my wife once called bilge water.
Here at Wine School, we respect the myriad differences in personal taste. We nonetheless urge even those who detest a wine to revisit it periodically, especially in situations where that wine typically flourishes.
It’s possible that minds won’t change. But manzanilla is wonderful partnered with classic Spanish snacks like Marcona almonds, jamon Ibérico, olives and fried seafood. It may well be that a time-honored combination like this will unlock closed palates. Or not.
What’s most important is the willingness to explore. It helps to create conditions that increase the odds of success.
The flavor is not the only thing about manzanilla and sherry generally that makes it so unusual. The method for making the wine is like no other.
DRY SHERRY is made only from palomino grapes grown in the area of Andalusia in southern Spain bounded by the towns of Jerez de la Frontera, El Puerto de Santa María and Sanlúcar de Barrameda.
The grapes are fermented into wine and then fortified. That is, neutral grape spirit is added to the wine to raise its level of alcohol.
Fortification is not unique. Many different wines are fortified, most famously port and Madeira, but also lesser known genres like Marsala, Banyuls and Maury.
Unlike port, in which the wines are fortified midway through the fermentation, leaving residual sugar that sweetens the wine, dry sherries are fortified after fermentation is completed, leaving little if any residual sugar.
Why fortify? Stay with me.
Unlike the vast majority of wines in the world, sherry is deliberately oxidized. That is, when the newly fermented wine is put in barrels to age, some space is left in the containers for air. This is counter to almost every other winemaking procedure, in which the aim is to protect the wine from oxidation.
If the unfortified wines are fuller bodied, they may be selected to become oloroso sherries. These wines will age under the influence of oxygen, and will develop a robustly savory, meaty character that is completely different from manzanilla. These oxidative sherries are a subject for another occasion.
Finer, more delicate wines will likewise be put in barrels that are not entirely filled, leaving room for air. Almost immediately, in the barrel, a layer of yeast begins to develop on the exposed surface of the wine. This yeast, or flor, imparts the fascinating nutlike, almondy character of dry sherry.
The historical reason for fortifying sherry was to stabilize the wine for shipping. With sherry, the level of fortification indicates what sort of wine it will become. Those intended to age under flor are fortified to about 15 percent alcohol, an environment in which the yeast flourish. Those intended to be olorosos are fortified to somewhere above 17 percent, which kills the flor.
Other wines in the world also age with the benefit of florlike yeast, like certain white wines from the Jura region of France, which are said to be aged under a veil of yeast, or sous voile. These wines exhibit some similarities to sherry, but they come from a different place, are made with different grapes, are not fortified, and they are not aged as sherry is, in a solera.
The solera is almost synonymous with sherry. It is a complex method of blending vintages over time so that newer wines are gradually mixed with older ones to eventually produce a sherry encompassing many different vintages.
If sherry is aged under flor long enough, the flor will eventually begin to disappear, and the wine will continue aging with direct exposure to air. These sherries that begin aging under flor and end aging oxidatively are amontillados.
If the wine is bottled while it is still under flor, it will be a fino sherry, with one exception: Those finos made from grapes grown around the seaside town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda are called manzanilla.
What distinguishes manzanilla from other finos? If all fino sherries are pungently briny, manzanilla is even more so. Ask the people who live in Sanlúcar, and they will tell you it’s because of the salt breeze that blows in constantly off the Atlantic.
Manzanilla has another singular characteristic, its texture, which feels almost fragile next to richer finos. This combination of intensity and weightlessness is pure joy to sherry lovers.
AS ALWAYS, I recommended three bottles to sample over the last month: Bodegas Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla La Gitana, Bodegas Yuste Aurora Manzanilla and Valdespino Manzanilla Deliciosa en Rama Saca de Primavera 2018.
These wines offered quite different expressions of manzanilla, revealing more about how the wines were produced.
La Gitana was a classic example of modern manzanilla, brilliantly clear and light-bodied, yet briny and saline, with floral and olive highlights. It was delicious, exactly what you are happy to get in a restaurant if you order a glass of manzanilla.
The Valdespino was similar and yet entirely different. It was darker than La Gitana, almost amber, and while the aromas and flavors of olives, nuts, flowers and ocean brine were not so different, they were far more intense, lingering long after swallowing. The Valdespino was also more textured, offering a grittier feeling than the gliding Gitana.
The differences stem partly from those words on the label of the Valdespino, “en Rama Saca de Primavera 2018.”
La Gitana was made in the modern fashion, filtered for clarity and stabilized. This gives the wine its lightness and brilliance, but strips it of some complexity and staying power, hence the conventional wisdom that manzanilla must be drunk young because it is fragile and cannot age.
By contrast, “en rama” indicates that the Valdespino was only lightly filtered at most, as was typical of sherries until the middle of the 20th century. This hands-off approach preserves the wine’s natural defenses, allowing it to age and evolve.
The other part of the message, “Saca de Primavera 2018” indicates that the wine was drawn from its solera and bottled in the spring of 2018. If I interpret the bottle code of La Gitana correctly, the wine I drank was bottled in April 2019, so the Valdespino had a full year of additional bottle-aging along with possibly more time in the solera than the Gitana.
Clearly, the conventional wisdom that manzanilla must be consumed right away does not apply to en rama bottles.
This combination of additional age and minimal processing results in this more intense, complex wine. This is not to say the Valdespino en rama will always be better. Sometimes, I might prefer a lighter, simpler wine like La Gitana.
By the way, en rama versions of La Gitana are sometimes available, too, as are conventional bottles of the Valdespino. It’s worth comparing to see which you like better.
That leaves the third bottle, the Yuste Aurora, which occupied a middle ground. It, too, was darker and fuller bodied than La Gitana, perhaps a little more nutlike and floral than saline in its flavors. It actually made me think more of a fino than a manzanilla.
Yuste was the least transparent in its labeling. I had to ask its importer for help in determining that it was bottled in November 2018, just about halfway between the other two. I can only speculate on its production, though I would guess it likewise received more filtering than the Valdespino and less than La Gitana.
Readers, not surprisingly, had mixed feelings about these polarizing wines. VSB of San Francisco suggested that the pairing of La Gitana and cold fried chicken bordered on the miraculous, which contradicts Andalusian folk wisdom (If it swims, fino; if it flies, amontillado; if it walks, oloroso), but so what?
Peter of Philadelphia had a different reaction: “Wine School taught me something today. Taught me I don’t like sherry. This makes me wonder how the same wine can be pleasant for one person and horrible for another.”
Dan Barron of New York found both versions of La Gitana and was struck by how much more he liked the en rama bottle: “fuller, intenser, nuttier, sea-muckier than its filtered counterpart.”
