Sherry Wine: The Complete History of Spain’s Fortified Wine

Sherry wine is one of the oldest, strangest, and most misunderstood great wines in the world — a fortified wine from the chalk-white hills of southern Spain that ranges from bone-dry and bracing to lusciously sweet, aged under a living veil of yeast and blended across generations in a system found almost nowhere else. Once the most prestigious wine in England and the drink of Shakespeare’s heroes, then dismissed for decades as a dusty relic, sherry is now hailed by sommeliers as one of wine’s last great bargains. This is its remarkable history.

From Sherish to sherry

Wine has been made around Jerez for close to three thousand years, since the Phoenicians founded nearby Cádiz. But the wine’s modern name comes from its Moorish past: under Muslim rule the town was called Sherish, which the English tongue bent into sherry.¹ After the Christian reconquest of Jerez in 1264, the wine trade with northern Europe grew steadily, and by the sixteenth century Jerez wine — known to the English as sack, probably from the Spanish sacar, “to draw out” or export — had become a national favourite in England.

It was the wine of Shakespeare’s stage: Falstaff’s rapturous praise of a good “sherris-sack” is the most famous toast to any wine in English literature. And its fame was sealed, oddly, by war — when Sir Francis Drake sacked Cádiz in 1587, he carried home reportedly some 2,900 casks of sherry, flooding England with the wine and fixing the national taste for good.¹

The Sherry Triangle

Real sherry can come from only one small patch of Andalusia: the Sherry Triangle, bounded by the towns of Jerez de la Frontera, El Puerto de Santa María, and Sanlúcar de Barrameda.² Its greatest asset is the soil — albariza, a dazzling white chalk that soaks up the winter rains and holds moisture deep underground through the fierce Andalusian summer, feeding the vines when no rain falls for months.

The grape that grows there is Palomino, which makes a rather neutral base wine — and that neutrality is the point, a blank canvas for the transformations to come. Sanlúcar, cooled by Atlantic breezes off the mouth of the Guadalquivir, has its own humid microclimate that gives its wines a distinctive tang, and its own protected name: Manzanilla.

Flor: the living veil

Sherry’s greatest miracle is invisible to the drinker: a film of living yeast called flor that grows spontaneously on the surface of the wine as it ages in the barrel.³ This pale, waxy veil seals the wine off from the air, protecting it from oxidation while feeding on it — and in doing so it gives Fino and Manzanilla their electric, saline, almost briny freshness, flavours found in no other wine on earth. Where the flor grows thick, the wine stays pale and tangy; this is biological ageing.

Where the veil is thin or dies away, air reaches the wine and slowly darkens it, deepening it toward flavours of walnut, toffee, and old wood — oxidative ageing, which produces the amber Oloroso style. The whole spectrum of sherry hangs on the life and death of this fragile living skin, a piece of natural magic that winemakers can guide but never fully command.

The solera: wine without a vintage

Sherry keeps no vintages. Instead it is aged and blended through the solera system — rows of barrels stacked in tiers, the oldest wine resting nearest the floor (the solera), the youngest above (the criaderas).⁴ When wine is drawn from the oldest barrels for bottling, they are topped up from the tier above, which is topped up from the tier above that, and so on up the pyramid.

The effect is a continuous, endless blending across time: a glass of sherry poured today contains a small fraction of wine from many years past, reaching back — in the oldest soleras — more than a century. It is a system built for consistency and patience, a way of making each bottle a average of decades rather than the snapshot of a single harvest. No other wine region has ever made age itself so central to its craft.

A family of styles

Few wines offer so wide a range from a single place. The palest and driest are Fino and, from Sanlúcar, Manzanilla, aged under flor. Amontillado begins its life under flor and finishes exposed to air, so it is amber, dry, and nutty; Oloroso is richer, darker, and fully oxidative; and the rare Palo Cortado sits mysteriously between the two.⁵ All of these are naturally bone dry.

Sweetness, when it comes, is added from other grapes — above all Pedro Ximénez (PX), sun-dried to raisins and pressed into an almost black, syrupy nectar of figs and molasses. Blends of dry and sweet give the Cream and Medium sherries that once conquered the mass market. From a searingly dry Fino to a spoon-coating PX, it is arguably the most versatile wine family in the world.

The British houses, the fall, and the revival

For centuries sherry was as much a British business as a Spanish one. Merchant families — many of them British or Irish — settled in Jerez and built great bodegas, and their names still dominate the trade: González Byass, founded in 1835 and home of the iconic Tío Pepe Fino, alongside Osborne, Domecq, Sandeman, and Harveys, whose Bristol Cream became a household word.⁶ At its height sherry was among the most traded fine wines on earth.

Then came the fall. Through the twentieth century, cheap, sweetened “cream” sherry sold in vast quantities but hollowed out the wine’s reputation, and by the century’s end sherry had become a byword for something dowdy left at the back of a cupboard. Its rescue came from an unlikely quarter: sommeliers and chefs, who rediscovered dry sherry as one of the greatest and most food-friendly wines in existence — and the greatest bargain in fine wine. New categories certifying age (VOS and VORS, for wines averaging twenty and thirty years) and unfiltered en rama bottlings have crowned the revival. The oldest of wines has become, improbably, one of the most fashionable.

The venencia and the tapas table

Sherry carries its own theatre. In the bodegas of Jerez, wine is drawn from the barrel by a venenciador, who plunges a venencia — a small silver cup on a long flexible whalebone or cane handle — through the delicate veil of flor and then pours a thin ribbon of wine from high above the head into a waiting copita, aerating it without ever disturbing the barrel.⁵ It is a piece of living craft as old as the trade itself.

Above all, sherry is a wine for the table. Andalusia built an entire culture around it: an ice-cold Fino or Manzanilla beside a plate of jamón, olives, and fried fish is one of the great food-and-wine pairings in the world, while nutty Amontillado flatters hard cheese and consommé, Oloroso stands up to rich stews, and syrupy Pedro Ximénez is poured, unforgettably, over vanilla ice cream. That versatility — a single region offering a wine for every course — is exactly why sommeliers fell back in love with it.

Keep exploring Spanish wine

• Spanish Wine: The Complete History — the national story sherry helped begin.
• Rioja Wine: The Complete History — Spain’s most famous red region.
• Ribera del Duero — the high plateau of Spain’s most powerful reds.

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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The New Spain

John Radford

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References & further reading

1. Julian Jeffs, Sherry, 5th ed. (Mitchell Beazley, 2004), the standard modern history of the wine, its trade, and Drake’s raid. ↩
2. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “sherry,” “Jerez,” and “albariza.” ↩
3. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, s.v. “flor” and “biological ageing.” ↩
4. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, s.v. “solera” and “criadera.” ↩
5. Jan Read, Sherry and the Sherry Bodegas (Sotheby’s, 1988), on the styles of sherry and the bodegas of the triangle. ↩
6. Consejo Regulador de las Denominaciones de Origen “Jerez-Xérès-Sherry” y “Manzanilla-Sanlúcar de Barrameda”; company histories of González Byass and the British sherry trade. ↩