LUXURY LIVING DINING u
I truly do not know many foreigners who like fino sherry. They usually consider it to be too dry and to have an unusual taste. Indeed, it is very low on sugar and the tang is down to it being a wine that is blended( there is no such thing as a vintage sherry) and will always contain base wines of considerable age. Many people prefer the less dry varieties like amontillados and olorosos, which are darker in colour and have more body- and more alcohol. An old oloroso, for example, can have up to 20 º. When you visit a sherry bodega you will be served this variety first before moving to a fino session- that can last a long time- and you certainly could not stay upright if you drank the same amount of these heavier wines.
So how about the old battle: fino versus manzanilla? Traditionally, and many years ago, it was definitely not done to drink manzanilla almost anywhere outside Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where it comes from. Never properly marketed, always the poor cousin of proud Jerez’ s fino, cheaper and generally a tad less refined, why drink it at all? However with diet-conscious Spaniards turning more and more to‘ light’ versions of everything in sight, someone in Sanlúcar had the bright idea of producing a‘ light’ sherry, this eventually materialising in a manzanilla with less alcohol. And I suppose if you are drinking sherry at the feria from midnight until six in the morning, this can be an advantage. It caught on, and before you could say Tio Pepe or La Ina, the manzanilla brands of La Guita, La Gitana, Solear and others had swept the board. But as usual in such cases the gap subsequently narrowed. The Jerezanos reduced the alcohol content in fino, and the price of the best manzanillas climbed to the same as that of fino. So back to square one.
However a dyed-in-the-wool Jerezano will never order a copa of manzanilla, at a feria or anywhere else. Nevertheless many aficionados maintain that being made in a coastal town you can taste the sea in it. As Sanlúcar has become more built up, local lore maintains that the bodegas on the lower ground facing the ocean no longer receive the sea breezes, and their wine has changed in character, while the bodegas on the higher level( of which Barbadillo is the largest), still preserve this unusual and attractive characteristic.
Another story, is that if you take a barrel of manzanilla to Jerez, inland, and vice-versa, the manzanilla will become fino and the fino will become manzanilla. Which is why every large Jerez producer has a maturing warehouse in Sanlúcar. Miracles of that wonderful living creature which is wine.
So, if we are heading off to the feria, which brands do we order? Well, as at any time, the betterknown brands are usually the safest. Solear, from Barbadillo( who also produce the ubiquitous bestselling white table wine, Castillo de San Diego) is a top-ranker. La Goya, from Delgado Zuleta, is termed a manzanilla pasada( or, in the modern idiom, manzanilla fina) and is excellent, although not easy to find. Argüeso is one of the oldest Sanlúcar bodegas, and their wine is superb, but harder to get hold of outside the immediate area. La Guita, perhaps the best-known manzanilla of them all, now belongs to the Estevez Group, and is the most consumed wine in many local ferias starting with Seville. It sells all it can produce with hardly any going for export.
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