Sherry Is the Best-Value Wine in the World. Here’s Where to Start

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No other wine region sells wine with an average age of a decade or more for the price of a weeknight Côtes du Rhône. That is the whole argument for sherry, and this sherry wine guide exists because the argument keeps having to be made. Sherry’s reputation in the United States was ruined by sweet brown supermarket blends and a grandmother’s decanter; the wines that bars in Jerez, London and New York are pouring now are bone dry, saline, nutty and startling, and they are underpriced because a generation walked away from them. Start with the system that makes them, then the styles, then the bottles.

How sherry is made: flor and the solera

Sherry comes from a triangle of chalky albariza soil around Jerez de la Frontera, Sanlúcar de Barrameda and El Puerto de Santa María in Andalusia. The grape is almost always Palomino, which makes a neutral base wine; the character comes afterwards. The wine is fortified with grape spirit and put into old American oak butts that are deliberately not filled to the top. What happens next depends on the strength. Fortified to around 15 percent, the wine grows a layer of yeast on its surface called flor, which feeds on the wine, protects it from oxygen and gives it the bread-dough, green-apple, sea-air character of fino. Fortified to 17 percent or more, flor cannot survive, and the wine ages in contact with air instead, darkening and turning to walnut, dried fruit and leather: that is oloroso.

Both then go through the solera, a fractional blending system in which wine is drawn for bottling from the oldest butts, which are topped up from the next oldest, and so on down to the youngest. No butt is ever emptied. A solera started in 1850 still contains, in a diminishing but real proportion, wine from 1850. The law sets a minimum average age of two years; serious bottlings average far longer, and the VOS and VORS categories certify average ages of twenty and thirty years. That is why an amontillado at the price of a village Burgundy can taste older than any Burgundy you have opened.

The six styles, from pale to black

• Fino: aged entirely under flor in Jerez or El Puerto. Pale, bone dry, yeasty, almond and chamomile, 15 percent alcohol. Serve very cold, as you would Champagne, and finish the bottle within a week.
• Manzanilla: fino aged in Sanlúcar, on the Atlantic, where the thicker flor and sea air make it lighter and saltier. The best apéritif wine in the world, and the best with fried fish, olives and anchovies.
• Amontillado: a fino whose flor has died off, so it begins biologically and finishes oxidatively. Amber, dry, hazelnut and tobacco with the fino’s salt still underneath. The most versatile with food.
• Palo cortado: a wine that was marked for fino and then turned, through accident or judgment, into something with amontillado’s nose and oloroso’s body. Rare, expensive relative to the others, and still cheap by any other region’s standards.
• Oloroso: aged oxidatively from the start, dark, full, 17 to 20 percent, walnut, orange peel and old wood. Dry, despite the colour; the sweet versions are labelled cream.
• Pedro Ximénez: made from sun-dried PX grapes, black, syrupy, figs and molasses, with enough acidity to keep it from being merely sweet. Pour it over vanilla ice cream and stop apologising for it.

Everything in this list except PX and the cream blends is dry. The confusion comes from the word sherry having been used for a century to sell sweetened, blended wines that no bodega in Jerez would pour for itself. Read the label: fino, manzanilla, amontillado, palo cortado and oloroso are dry by definition under the regulations.

Seven bottles to start with

These are all widely distributed in the US and all under the price of a mid-range Napa Cabernet. Buy a fino and an amontillado first; they teach you the two halves of the region in two glasses.

• González Byass Tío Pepe Fino: the reference fino: dry, yeasty, sharp, and the one every bar in Jerez pours. Buy the freshest bottling you can find. Shop it at Wine.com
• Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla: lighter and saltier than Tío Pepe, with the Sanlúcar sea-spray character; chill hard and drink with anything fried. Shop it at Wine.com
• Lustau Dry Amontillado Los Arcos: the entry point to oxidative sherry at a price that makes no sense: hazelnut, dried orange, long and bone dry. Shop it at Wine.com
• Lustau Peninsula Palo Cortado: the most accessible palo cortado in US distribution; amontillado nose, oloroso weight, a wine to make people stop talking. Shop it at Wine.com
• Lustau Don Nuño Dry Oloroso: dark, walnut and leather, completely dry; the bottle for roast game, aged cheese and the first cold week of November. Shop it at Wine.com
• Williams & Humbert Dry Sack Medium: an honest medium blend of amontillado and oloroso with a touch of PX, for drinkers who want a bridge from the sweet styles they know. Shop it at Wine.com
• Lustau San Emilio Pedro Ximénez: black, viscous, raisin and coffee; a small glass with blue cheese or over ice cream ends a dinner better than most dessert wines twice the price. Shop it at Wine.com

How to serve and store sherry

Fino and manzanilla are white wines with a yeast problem: serve them at 45 to 50°F, in a white-wine glass rather than the tiny schooner, and treat an opened bottle like an opened white. They will hold a week in the fridge, no more, and a bottle that has sat on a shelf for two years is already tired, which is why the bodegas print bottling dates. Amontillado, palo cortado and oloroso are more forgiving: serve them at cellar temperature, and an open bottle keeps for a month or more with the cork in. PX is effectively immortal.

With food, think of sherry as the wine for everything that fights other wines. Artichokes, asparagus, olives, soy, vinegar, cured ham, smoked fish, anchovies, almonds and oily tapas all flatten a Chardonnay and make a fino sing. Amontillado is the answer to mushroom dishes and consommé, and to the cheese board; oloroso handles braised oxtail, game and anything with a dark sauce. For the Thanksgiving table, a glass of manzanilla with the olives and nuts before dinner costs less than the appetiser and resets the whole evening.

Why it is still this cheap

Sherry’s prices are low because demand collapsed from the 1980s and the bodegas have been slow to raise them, not because the wine is simple. The grape is neutral, which bothers people who have been trained to taste for varietal fruit; the ageing is long, which the market has decided not to pay for; and the names are unfamiliar. None of that will last. Equipo Navazos, the négociant that bottles single-butt selections under the La Bota label, already sells at prices that reflect what is in the glass, and the great old VORS wines from the historic bodegas have begun to climb. Buy a case of Los Arcos now and let the market catch up to you. For the region letter by letter, see Wine A to Z by Santé.