Alcademics.com

Sherry Seminar

Steve Olson is a consultant and spokesperson for the Wines from Spain, a group of Spanish wine producers. We met at B44 on Belden Lane for a Spanish lunch and big sherry tasting with 14 really fine examples.

Sherry is a particularly difficult wine to understand, for reasons explained below. Last year I attended a two-day training at the Sandeman bodega in Jerez, and I learned a huge amount about the terroir, production, legality, and flavor of sherry. They really tried to make it easy for us. But then came the hard part- the tasting.

It's not hard because it's hard to drink; it's hard because of the labels. We learned a ton of new (to me) vocabulary for understanding what type of sherry would be in the bottle, but none of that verbiage is necessarily on the bottle label. Frustrating. But anyway, here are some sherry basics.

Sherry is aged and fortified wine from the region of Jerez de la Frontera in Spain. The fortification is to help the wine age (in bodegas now, but in holds of ships long ago). There are two types of aging: biological and oxidative. Biological aging is aging in barrels under flor, a yeast that grows on top of the wine. The yeast forms a barrier to oxygen touching the wine (think of the film on top of soup), and the wine tastes bready and pungent like (but not just like) dry vermouth. Oxidative aging is aging without flor- the wine is exposed to oxygen and turns rusty in color and the flavor becomes sharper and more candied dark-fruit like (but not just like) sweet vermouth.

All sherry starts under flor for the first year or so of its life, then may or may not have oxidative aging. You can keep it under flor for a long expanse of its life, and/or under oxidative aging for more of its life. The types of sherry generally indicate where we are along the path.

• Fino and Manzanilla sherries are aged entirely under flor.
• Manzanilla Pasada sherries have a long time under flor.
• Amontillado sherries do some time under flor, and sometime without it- I believe usually in about equal parts.
• Palo Cortado sherries are between Amontillado and the next category.
• Oloroso sherries spend the majority of their time under oxidative aging.
• Some oloroso sherries will have sweet wines added to them to make them sweeter (in England, these are known as "cream sherries") and this sweet wine is Pedro Ximenez, or PX. PX is also sold on its own.

This is all stuff I knew about before the lunch tasting. Here are a few new things I learned from Steven Olson:

• Sherry is the driest wine in the world. Why? Because flor eats the sugar in the wine.
• Olson says that manzanilla pasada is "probably the most versatile wine in the world for pairing with food."
• There were tons of different grape varieties in Jerez before Phylloxera. Afterward, everybody planted Palomino.

Oh, Sherry!

I haven't seen the print edition yet, but the digital edition of my story in Men's Book (by San Francisco Magazine) is viewable online here.

The story is about sherry in cocktails. The story mentions drinks on the menu at 15 Romolo, NOPA, and the forthcoming Gitane, but since I wrote it, sherry drinks have been turning up everywhere.

One of my favorite drinks in San Francisco right now is Joel Baker's "Drink Without a Name #3". It contains Fino or Manzanilla sherry, Chartreuse, and a basil garnish, and was originally created with fresh pears but is on the menu now at Bourbon & Branch with stone fruit instead. (Or at least it was- they recently changed the menu for fall.)

The print is too small to read these screen shots, so follow the link about to read the story online. It's on Pages 90-91.

Reading material: post-European edition

You may not have noticed thanks to the incredible blog technology that allows me to write posts in advance, but I was out of the country all last week. Here are some things that have stuck in my brain as I catch up on my reading:

Eric Felten (I pretty much link to his column every week) writes about the Sherry Cobbler, and how it popularized both the cocktail shaker and the straw. 

Then he wrote about Georgian (not the US one) brandy.

W. Blake Gray says that "Nigori is the White Zinfandel of sake," but found one he actually likes.

Partying like it's 1905, towns in New Zealand move to ban absinthe. 

They're dropping like flies in SF! Thomas Waugh left The Alembic for the shores of NYC, and Jacqueline Patterson is no longer managing the bar at Orson but is still in town. Unconfirmed rumor is that Carlos Yturria is no longer at Grand Pu Bah and is now bar manager at Bacar.

Heaven Hill is releasing a Tabasco-branded tequila. Now that's a spicy margarita!

Sherry everywherey

I really thought I was going to be ahead of the curve on studying sherry in cocktails. I went to Jerez, I read books, I wrote a story for Men's Book by San Francisco Magazine that will be out soon. I was going to own sherry.

But no. Sherry is this year's vermouth. All the drink writers had the same idea at the same time as (okay, probably before) I did. And now the stories are popping up everywhere.

I noticed that this year's Sherry Vinos de Jerez competition is getting more press than ever. Just the other night I was out at Bourbon & Branch having a sherry cocktail that won the Sherries of Spain competition a few years ago, Jacques Bezuidenhout's magnificent La Perla, made with Manzanilla sherry, reposado tequila, and pear liqueur. While looking up the recipe, I see that Paul Clarke wrote about it for Imbibe more than a year ago.

Jordan Mackay, who is usually months ahead of me on his story ideas, just wrote about Manzanilla sherry on CHOW.com, though not for use in cocktails (phew!).

Then David Wondrich knocked it out of the park with a cultural history of sherry's popularity in this month's Saveur Magazine, and includes tasting notes, and recipes for the Sherry Cobbler, SanRu Cocktail, and Bamboo Cocktail.

Eventually I'll learn that I can't compete for good ideas with smarter people than I, but for now at least I'm in good company.