Morrisons Fino Sherry, Jerez, Spain NV (£8.50, Morrisons) Yeast. That’s the secret to the intensely savoury appeal of dry fino and manzanilla sherry. If that sounds like a boneheadedly simplistic statement of the bleeding obvious given that of course, yeast – specifically the strain Saccharomyces cerevisiae – plays an essential role in all wine as the agent of fermentation turning sugar into alcohol, please bear with me. With fino and manzanilla, a specially adapted form of the strain has an extra part to play, with winemakers in and around Jerez in Andalucía, encouraging a thick, almost crusty layer known as flor to form on top of the wines in the barrel as they age. The flor, which acts as barrier between sherry and the air at the top of the barrel, helps create a much lighter (in colour and feel) style than other, darker forms of sherry such as oloroso. It also creates flavours that range from fresh apple to grilled almond, sourdough bread and Marmite, all adding up to such compulsively drinkable bottlings as Morrisons’ bargain own-label bottling.
Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla En Rama Spring 2024, Jerez, Spain NV (£19.95, Tanners) If you find that yeasty tang as compelling as I do, you might want to look for the term ‘en rama’, which translates, literally, as ‘from the branch’, but is best understood as ‘in the raw’. These are fino and manzanilla sherries that are much less heavily filtered than others, bottled straight from the barrel, often in the spring, when the flor layer in the butts is at its most active. The idea is that you get a more intensely lively and savoury-flavoury style. But the annual release of new bottlings also gives sherry producers (the vast majority of whose bottlings rely on blending several years in a consistent house style) the chance to make a wine that is different each year. Among my spring-bottled favourites this year is one from the Hidalgo bodega, which is based in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, home of manzanilla. It’s a vivacious dry sherry with a pronounced, mouthwatering sea-salty seasoning that is particularly good with miso ramen noodles.
Gonzalez Byass Tío Pepe Tres Palmas Fino Sherry, Jerez, Spain NV (£34.11, 50cl, Master of Malt) Like a faded colonial power, the sherry trade has spent the past three or four decades trying, not always successfully, to adapt to its reduced status in the world. Exports are about a fifth of what they were in their heyday in the late 1970s, and finding a way to make the industry relevant in a new age hasn’t always been easy. One method settled on by the better bodegas has been to focus on quality rather than quantity, leading to such richly inimitable and irresistible wines as the ravishingly silky, intensely nutty and iodine-scented Tres Palmas Fino bottling from a single butt made by the firm behind the excellent, widely available, great value Tío Pepe Fino (£11.49, Waitrose). Other producers, meanwhile, have applied the flor-ageing technique to dry, unfortified (and therefore significantly lower-in-alcohol) wines, such as the astonishing 11.5% abv mix of minerals and classic complex yeast-derived flavours of Equipo Navazos La Bota 119 de Florpower MMXXII (Vino Blanco 2022, £36, fourthandchurchshop.co.uk).
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