Drinking, eating… loving sherry?

Some thoughts about whether obsessing about gastronomy is the best way to get people to drink sherry.

The sherry Consejo Regulador took a momentous decision 20 years ago to “put gastronomy at the centre of what we do” according to el jefe César Saldaña. “It was controversial at the time,” he explained at a recent lunch at Quo Vadis in London to celebrate the two decades of sherry and food. The sherry marketing board has put together a book called Eating, Drinking, Loving, Sherry - which goes quite well to the tune of ‘Living Loving Maid’ by Led Zeppelin. Drinking, eating… loving sherry!

It contains contributions from such notables as Sarah Jane Evans and Jancis Robinson, both Masters of Wine. There are also some rather less accessible articles which may have worked better in their original language like ‘The Gastronomic DNA of Sherry Wine through the Aromatic Science of Molecular Hamornies’ by François Chartier. Catchy.

At the lunch, Evans described the decision to concentrate on gastronomy as “radical” and “crazy”. At the time sherry was largely drunk in Northern Europe on its own usually in the dreaded schooner - a tiny glass that would have been filled up to the brim. 

It was really only in Jerez and the surrounding area that sherry was thought of as a food wine, indeed a wine at all. Since then the Consejo Regulador has put on an annual Copa Jerez where chefs from around the wold come up with dishes to pair with sherry. Evans rhaphosided about a heavenly commingling of PX sherry with bananas and chocolate. 

To make the point we drank only sherry through the meal. A Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla with smoked eel, Valdespino’s Tio Diego Amontillado with rillettes, and Lustau Don Nuño Oloroso with roast pork. Did it all work? Up to a point. Naturally the manzanilla was superb with the eel. But while I loved both the darker sherries, something like a good Beaujolais with the rillettes and with the roast pork a crunchy Spanish garnacha would have been my preferences. Furthermore, I don’t want to drink wines at nearly 20% throughout a meal. I like to drink immoderately. All it proved to me is that food and wine is so personal that I can’t quite see the point in these kind of exercises. 

In some ways the Copa Jerez has been very successful. The wine trade and especially sommeliers seem very into it. Upmarket wines from smaller producers like Viña Corrales , Bodegas Tradicion and Equipo Navazos seem custom-designed to get sommeliers all hot and bothered. Copa Jerez etc is great for getting high end sherries into Michelin-starred restaurants and generating publicity in the drink and food press. 

Does this sort of thing increase sales further down the line? I’m not so sure. Despite the home tapas blip during Covid lockdowns, sherry sales have continued to slide all over the world (see this post my Andrew Neather). In the last 20 years Spanish restaurants have proliferated across Britain and the image of the country’s food has been transformed. And yet what do most people drink at Barrafina etc? Albariño, godello, Rioja. They’re not drinking sherry.

The sherry marketing board might think they are doing something revolutionary but marketing campaigns like this have been tried before. Harry Eyres writes in his neglected classic Wine Dynasties of Europe about Chartered Estates (Charta), an association of premium Rheingau producers, attempting to to sell riesling through food and wine matching in the 1980s:

“For the last three years, Charta has laid on a lavish dinner at the Intercontinental Hotel in London to try to prove that its wines are not only good by themselves, but can partner a wider range of dishes than the sceptical British, who have become used to drinking German wines on their own, would imagine. Responses have been mixed…. When roast beef was served, however, the British wine trade and press collectively sighed for some decent claret.”

That is how I felt during the meal. Most people don’t really think in terms of food pairing. I’m massively into wine and food but I’ll open pretty much anything with anything except, sorry pairing nerds, I will generally serve red wine with meat and white wine with fish. The emphasis on gastronomy seems aimed at the tiny segment of the population who have different glasses for different wines and are always thinking about what goes with umami. 

While I love being invited to swanky lunches at Quo Vadis. I don’t think food and wine pairing is the way out of sherry’s doom spiral. So what is? Well to start with it’s never going back to where it was in the 1970s. The sherry industry was built on supplying wines to Northern Europe at a time when there was no NZ sauvignon, Italian pinot grigio or Argentine malbec. Table wines were unreliable. Most people drank beer and spirits. For the British market sherry and port were pretty much the only game in town. 

But I think there are cautious reasons for optimism. The natural wine crew are experimental and into peculiar flavours which sherry can provide by the yard - see my recent post on sherry from Morrisons. They’re often not interested in a consistent drinking experience, they just want to try new things. Now can you imagine if some famous person who I have probably never heard of professed a love of sherry like Emma d'Arcy did with the negroni sbagliato? That might shift a few bottles.

The other people who are a massive open goal for the sherry marketing board are dark spirits drinkers (not that wine drinkers or spirits drinkers are entirely separate). 

Sherry might taste peculiar for palates brought up on fruity wines but if you're a whisky, vermouth or cocktail drinker, then it doesn't taste strange at all. Whisky fans tend to be particularly receptive, partly because whisky is often aged in old sherry casks, so learning about it involves learning about sherry. The two drinks share other similarities. Darker sherries like amontillados and olorosos often have flavours of nuts, dried fruit, orange peel, brown sugar and toffee, like a good whisky.

The spirits comparison is also useful for thinking about the time to drink sherry. While it can be a great food wine, it's also an excellent aperitif, after-dinner sipper and indeed cocktail ingredient.

At the end of the meal, after all the food and wine matching, we were given a cocktail made with Fernando de Castilla Classic Cream - a medium sweet sherry. Not only was it delicious, it might just be the future of sherry.