Jeffs - Sherry

THE CLASSIC WINE LIBRARY

Editorial board: Sarah Jane Evans, Joshua Greene, Richard Mayson

There is something uniquely satisfying about a good wine book, preferably read with a glass of the said wine in hand. The Classic Wine Library is a series of wine books written by authors who are both knowledgeable and passionate about their subject. Each title in The Classic Wine Library covers a wine region, country or type and together the books are designed to form a comprehensive guide to the world of wine as well as an enjoyable read, appealing to wine professionals, wine lovers, tourists, armchair travellers and wine trade students alike.

The series:

Port and the Douro, Richard Mayson

Cognac: The story of the worlds greatest brandy, Nicholas Faith

Sherry, Julian Jeffs

Madeira: The islands and their wines, Richard Mayson

The wines of Austria, Stephen Brook

Biodynamic wine, Monty Waldin

Spirits Distilled, Mark Ridgwell

The story of champagne, Nicholas Faith

The wines of Faugres, Rosemary George

This book

is humbly and affectionately dedicated

to the memory of

DON GUIDO

CAPTAIN GUY DINGWALL WILLIAMS, OBE, MC

Sherry Shipper

Acknowledgements

A great many of my friends in the sherry country have helped me prepare this book, so many in fact that I dare not try to list them as I know I should leave some out. I must, however, especially thank two of them: Beltrn Domecq Williams and Csar Saldaa Snchez, respectively president and secretary of the Consejo Regulador de las Denominaciones Jerez-Xrs-Sherry, Manzanilla-Sanlcar de Barrameda y Vinagre de Jerez, who took an infinite amount of trouble. They also provided the map and gave permission for its reproduction. My long-suffering wife Deborah came with me and supported me on all my visits.

I wish to thank the following authors and publishers for permission to quote from published works: the late Manuel Barbadillo for his Cancin ; Faber & Faber Ltd for a passage from T. S. Eliots The Family Reunion ; the Hutchinson Publishing Group for a long passage by E. M. Nicolson in Guy Mountforts Portrait of a Wilderness ; the editor of the Daily Telegraph for the passage quoted in the chapter on Manzanilla; Methuen & Co. Ltd and the executrix of the late G. K. Chesterton for verses from The Flying Inn ; and Bowes and Bowes (Publishers) Ltd for an extract from Roy Cambells translation of Garcia Lorcas Romance of the Civil Guard taken from his study of the poet.

Preface to the Sixth Edition

In 1956 I visited Jerez de la Frontera for the first time, aged twenty-five, intending to spend three days there and taste some of my favourite wines at source. To my surprise I was offered a job working in the bodegas of Williams & Humbert, where I stayed for eight months and saw every stage in the making of sherry from the vine to the bottle. It was one of the happiest periods of my life. I wanted to learn all I could about the wine, both its history and the way it was made. I read everything relevant I could lay my hands on, both in Spanish and in English. To my surprise I found that the history had not then been thoroughly researched and accounts of the wine making were inaccurate and deliberately left some things out, so there was only one thing to be done. I had to write my own book. I took a year off and did it.

The first detailed book was Henry Vizetellys Facts about Sherry , published in 1876. In eighty years practically nothing had changed. He had intended to follow it with a history, but unfortunately never wrote it. It remains a vital source book. Since then practically everything has changed. Some of the greatest names in the sherry trade have vanished, while others have risen up to take their place. The whole nature of the trade has changed, too. In those days the most popular wines in the export market were medium sherries, often mislabelled amontillado. Most of the wine was exported in bulk to be bottled, and sometimes blended, in England, where there were many independent merchants who had blends made up for them. The choice was vast but the quality generally mediocre, so sherry was thought of as a medium price wine rather than as one of the worlds greatest. The very old sherries that can be bought easily today were almost unheard of. As wine lovers we are much better off.

The way the wine is made has changed radically, too, partly because of an enormous increase in the cost of labour and partly through the rise of scientific enology, which has revolutionized wine making throughout the world, to the great benefit of wine. There are practically no failures now and some of the finest styles that were rare in 1956 are now readily available.

My book won the international award of the Office International de la Vigne et du Vin in Paris and became recognized as the standard work on sherry. It has since been revised continuously, the fifth edition being published in 2004 which again won the award of the OIV. Since then so much more has happened, and with this new edition I bring the story up to date.

Julian Jeffs,

East Ilsley, 2014

The Sherry Country

Jerez de la Frontera is a town in Andalusia about fourteen kilometres inland from the sea. It is on the old main road from Cadiz to Seville and used to be cursed by travellers as it was a major obstacle. Few of them stopped there, which was a blessing. They drove through busy streets with clean modern shops and saw none of the Moorish remains or romantic ruins that people like to think are typically Spanish. There was nothing to make them suspect that wine was grown there except a surfeit of sherry and brandy advertisements. They could see no vineyards from the main road only the salt flats near the sea and the fields of wheat and pasture further inland, vivid green after the spring rains and slowly baking to a golden ochre in the heat of the summer. The lack of vineyards surprised them and some asked suspiciously where sherry was grown.

Things are different now. The route of the old road to Cadiz has been changed; there is a bypass round the town and a new motorway to Seville. Unlike the old roads, the new one passes in full sight of the vineyards, though to see the finest the traveller must turn off into the side roads that lead to Rota, Trebujena or Sanlcar de Barrameda.

Beyond Trebujena, the road stops and the country turns wild. Rare birds and animals, extinct in every other part of Europe, thrive there, and there are no towns or villages. On the right bank of the River Guadalquivir is the land of the Marismas and the Coto Doana. It is carefully preserved and used to be difficult to get into but nowadays there are more visitors. Game birds abound and ornithologists who go there are well rewarded: they may see an Indian sand lark, masked shrike, golden oriole or Spanish imperial eagle. A hundred and ninety-three species of birds have been counted on the Coto Doana, and it is equally rich in animals and plants. At the beginning of February the storks fly in from South Africa and settle in the towns, nesting in high places such as church towers and the tops of disused chimneys. Here they breed and rear their young until they fly away at the end of June. To have a storks nest on the premises is thought a sign of luck.