Alcademics

Just yesterday I was in the elevator in my office building and the person next to me was trying to peep the book I had in my hand. (This is okay when there is a library in your building, we are all book peepers here.) The book is this giant 450 page book on sherry and he said something like, “I just can't get into sherry. It's so sweet but my grandma used to drink it.”

There was a while during which I thought we had moved away from the stereotype of sherry as an after dinner sweet wine like port, but I've heard the old trope a couple of times in the few weeks I've been carrying this book around San Francisco.

A few weeks back I was in a bar where the staff probably has to confront that stereotype on half of the transactions. The bar is El Lopo and the name of it isn't just Spanish for "the wolf," it signifies the LOwer POlk Street Neighborhood in which it's located.

I had a time set up to talk with the owner Daniel Azarkman, who said they're really focused on the neighborhood crowd there despite highlighting the food and wines from Spain. Specifically it is a sherry bar, yet even with all the hard work that they do to promote sherry as the beverage of choice, Azarkman tells me that unfortified wines make up probably half of their beverage sales. The other half is split between vermouth, cocktails, and sherry.

Azarkman said that when they get media hits, it often tends to be about their selection of vermouth. I have also seen vermouth trending more than sherry and asked him why specifically does vermouth seem to be having a bigger moment. He said in the first place while most people associate sherry with being very sweet (most of it is actually not) despite vermouth being the sweeter beverage. And despite the fact that people think that they don't like sweet drinks, everyone in the bartending community knows that people just like to think that they don't like sweet drinks but they actually do.

The second reason for vermouth's popularity, and I think this is a great call that I hadn't thought of before, is that a lot of people have been traveling to Spain and Italy lately, and particularly in Spain people have had the style of vermouth service there, and are happy to try it again back at home. (That style of service by the way is usually over ice with a simple garnish and sometimes with soda water added. That's a possibility here at El Lopo, and the vermouth section of the menu offers several options for modifying it with your choice of soda and garnishes from a list.

Anyway, despite the higher sales of unfortified wine to sherry, they offer a good selection of sherry and certainly more options than for the regular wine. As for the cocktails on the menu, they change seasonally, although there are a few staples on the menu like the their sherry version of the Margarita and the "Fine, Here's Your Goddamn Sangria."

So the bar exists to sell sherry, and the cocktails are nearly all sherry cocktails, but still Azarkman says they have to hand sell sherry to a lot of the customers. But they have a bunch of fun programming that encourages it.

The first of which is that during happy hour for a lot of the sherry on the menu it's two-for-one, but you don't get to drink the second sherry, you get to send it to a stranger in the bar. That seems like a great way to introduce more people to sherry as well as a way to introduce more people to each other.

A second program they have is called the "take care of me club". It's sort of like running a tab on a subscription- there is a house account you pay into, and the bartender will arrange various glasses and snacks on each visit, and you don't have to know the menu yourself, they just take care of you. Lovely. (If I lived closer I might use it as a "know when to quit because you've spent all your money club.")

Yet another thing they do here is have a version of karaoke called Sherry-Oke. It's available on certain days and anyone brave enough to perform karaoke on the microphone gets to drink $5 glasses of sherry for the rest of the night. Honestly I've never sung karaoke in my life but for a discount? I'm a little bit tempted.

Once a year they have been sponsoring a Porron Star competition on New Year's Eve. Competitors wear a white cloth in front of their shirt and are challenged to tip back and finish a porron of a red sherry, and whoever spills the least on themselves is the winner for that year. The prize is a engraved porron that only they are allowed to drink out of for the forthcoming year, and with a special price for what they drink out of it.

Still another community building exercise is that they take trips to Spain and invite their customers to come along. Their last trip to Spain didn't go to Jerez for sherry but to the Basque region, and according to the legacy information on the website up to 12 bar guests were able to join the bar staff for the trip.

But the community-building activity I was there for on the night of my visit was Sherry Week. The bar puts together an annual Sherry Bingo card that features drink specials at El Lopo and other bars in town. Drinkers can try to complete rows of the card in order to win prizes.

It wasn't a great week in America given the presidential election, but for those recovered (or seeking community in challenging times), there is still time to join for shenanigans until November 10. 

It seems that El Lopo is doing everything possible to get you to come into the bar and try some of their delicious sherry and Spanish food, so I think you should probably get in there and do just that.