The Reverend Simon Godfrey is fulfilling a dream. This most English of priests is making a pilgrimage to the southern Spanish town of Jerez de la Frontera, the spiritual home of sherry. Ever since his days at St Stephen's Theological College, Oxford, Father Simon has been partial to a drop of pale dry manzanilla. To this day, recipients of his ministry are, in time-honoured fashion, likely to tempt him to a healing glass of ruby-rich oloroso. He has trained them well. "Schooners are not appropriate," he states. "My flock serve sherry in proper fino glasses."
Father Simon is the Rector of Northampton, where he lives in some style in a 17th-century rectory. He is an imposing man, holy but not preachy, well-read and crisply consonanted. Arriving at Gatwick, he is treated to a snappy salute from a passing Salvation Army captain and an upgrade from the aircrew.
Jerez's tiny airport is buzzing. Simon has arrived in time for the vendimia, and all Andalucia appears to be in town to celebrate the grape harvest. The taxi into town takes 15 minutes, and passes through 25 centuries of viticulture. The Phoenicians introduced vines and winemaking here, and the Moors distilled grape juice into their al-kuhl; Pliny the Elder commended the town's wines to his Roman countrymen, and Jerez was exporting to the known world by the early 14th century.
Today, the hills surrounding Jerez are combed and braided in every direction with fields of close-grown vines, their leaves and luscious fruit coated with pale-grey dust from the chalky albariza soils. Simon drinks in the area's rich history. "Two Arab words, saca and xeris, gave birth to Shakepeare's 'Sherris sack'," he explains. From there it was a short step, via 'Jerez', to 'sherry', a chilled copita of which Father Simon sips upon arrival at his hotel.
"What better way" he wonders, "is there to celebrate one's coming to Jerez [he lingers on the name, rolling his tongue around it as if tasting an aged amontillado] than by witnessing the flamenco?" The town's Barrio de Santiago was flamenco's birthplace, and is the cradle of Spanish gypsy culture. Fortified by sherry wine, Father Simon strides into town. Jerez is an architectural gem, and he stops to admire a pediment here, a carved squinch there.
In a shabby square by the cathedral, he ducks into a grubby-looking drinking den where, under a naked bulb, a paunchy guitarist with greasy locks strums finger- shredding flourishes, accompanying a bulerías singer whose chin has become his chest. Haughty dancers take turns to strut the tiny stage, twirling their shawls and stamping their heels. Musicians and dancers clap syncopated off-beats, causing the room to pulse with passion, then pause, sheened in sweat, for applause. Fat green olives and farmy Manchego cheese accompany the Rector's pleasure, as do several glasses of fragrant fino.
Morning finds Father Simon at the town-centre bodega of González Byass. This Anglo-Spanish firm has been supplying Britain with sherry since 1835. The González family commissioned a young Gustave Eiffel to build a great circular bodega in curved, corrugated iron and Simon stalks around it, inspecting butts emblazoned with royal crests.
Through a cobbled, vine-shaded courtyard is the firm's oldest, most symbolic bodega. A room the size of a Welsh chapel is where the founder's 'Tío Pepe' ('Uncle Joe') devised the solera, or fractional-blending system of racked barrels by which fino is made (see panel). "There's a feeling of the church here," whispers Father Simon, "of ritual, of rhythm, of calm."
Simon's guide, the marvellously entitled Marquis of Bonanza, Don Mauricio González-Gordon López de Carrizosa, pokes a well-groomed, well-bred head around the door. "We call this the 'Cathedral of Sherry'," he intones, leading our priest to an immense warehouse that sits under vaulted ceiling arches, its windows shaded by mats woven of esparto grass. Black caulked barrels are stacked five-high on the albero clay floor.
A tasting session is set up. Simon sips all the styles, from the "cleansing" Tío Pepe fino to a "marmaladey, hazelnutty" oloroso. He is intoxicated by the velvet-rich, 15-year-old Apóstoles. He visits El Cristo, a giant 32-barrel cask, so named because Jesus was supposed to be aged 32 when he died. It contains wine from the 1862 vintage and is solemnly flanked by 12 apostolic casks. "In some ways," Father Simon ruminates, "a bodega is like a monastery. People work in it with a great sense of purpose."
In meditative mood, Simon leaves the expansive calm of the bodega for the busy, squeezed-in streets of the barrio that surrounds it. Spain's monasteries and convents are purported to produce the country's finest sweetmeats, and Don Mauricio has recommended that Father Simon visit one. The Convento de las Agostinas houses an order of nuns that bake like angels. Its heavy, studded door is opened a fraction by a diminutive nun. Seeing Father Simon's clerical rig, she squeals with glee.
"Where is your bishop?" she demands, cheekily. A crowd of similarly tiny, pin-neat nuns appears.
"And where are your parishioners?" the sisters chorus.
"Where are your cakes?" booms Father Simon, entering into the spirit.
Chirruping happily, the party, dwarfed by the English priest, follow their noses to an immaculate kitchen that smells like heaven. A sister is kneading dough with holy vigour. Snatches of a sung mass are faintly audible and the Rector saunters off to investigate. They emanate from a chapel dedicated to the miraculous Santa Rita.
Father Simon dips his finger and crosses himself. "I like Holy Water," he says. "I use it all the time." With the nuns gathered around him like petticoats under a bustle, Father Simon intones a final "Our Father" before departing, laden with buttery, shell-shaped magdalenas, to the seaside resort of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, one of the towns - along with Jerez and Puerto de Santa Maria - that form the Sherry Triangle, and the place where manzanilla is made.
En route to Sanlúcar, Father Simon spots a dozen workers harvesting the Palamino grapes that will become La Gitana manzanilla. Having trudged across the crunchy, crusty albarizo soil that has been baked hard by the oven-dry wind, he is presented with a bunch of grapes that are positively promiscuous with sweet juice. Shouldering a symbolic basket in unity with the grizzled grape-pickers, the Rector blesses the entire enterprise.
Sanlúcar is less formal than Jerez. While, in Jerez, the bodega master's elegant tasting tool is made from twisted whalebone and chased silver, in Sanlúcar it is cut from a length of the bamboo that fringes the Guadalquivir river. Tim Holt, who runs the Hidalgo bodega, came here from the home counties and fell for the lure of manzanilla. His well-washed, faded-blue shirt is tight as a cummerbund around his slight waist. Father Simon accepts a glass of Hidalgo's La Gitana manzanilla, its design-icon bottle emblazoned with an androgynous, provocative gypsy. "More delicate and ethereal than fino," he judges approvingly.
As Tim describes the solera system in his echoing cathedral of sherry, Father Simon is struck by another ecclesiastical analogy to fractional blending. "In the early days of the church," he beams, "the Communion cup was never completely drained, so there was unexpurgated wine, celebrating a continual mass." He brandishes his glass. "So let's share another drop of this sanctified stuff."
What is Sherry?
- Sherry is a fortified wine that comes from Andalucia, where it is always drunk from wine glasses and never from schooners. Only wines that are made in a triangular region defined by the towns of Jerez de la Frontera, Sanlúcar de Barrameda and Puerto de Santa Maria are eligible for the Jerez-Xérès-Sherry Denominación de Origen.
- The vast majority of sherry is made from the Palomino grape variety. The harvest usually begins around the start of September and takes about a month. During the harvest period, González Byass alone presses a million kilos of Palomino grapes a day.
- After pressing, the grape juice is fermented in large stainless steel
vats to produce an añada, a young vintage wine that is the starting point for sherry. As the winter temperatures cool the contents down, yeast sediment drops to
the bottom of the cask. The wines are now rated: the best are chosen to become fino, while the rest are turned into oloroso.
- For fino, the young wine is fortified with grape alcohol to a strength of 15 or 15.5 per cent abv and introduced into the solera system. This comprises a series of American oak casks, into the first of which the young wine is introduced. Here, it will mix with older wines that are already in the cask until, after a few months, a proportion will be drawn off. This will be placed in the second of the series of casks, taking the place of an identical volume of wine which has, in turn, been drawn off to progress into the third barrel... and so on, until the last of the series of casks, from which fully matured fino sherry is drawn off to be bottled.
- This process, called 'running the scales', takes place four times a year, and guarantees a sherry's consistency by smoothing out differences between grapes from different years. As such, sherry doesn't have a 'vintage', as do most other wines. Instead, the solera system means sherry is a mix of many years' wines. Imagine: the wine drawn from the final barrel of a solera may have memories of other wines within it stretching back 200 years.
- The other key component of fino's distinctiveness is a strain of yeast called flor. Unlike regular wine butts, sherry casks are only filled to five-sixths of their volume. This leaves a gap for air inside the barrels. Jerez's bodegas are teeming with flor, which penetrates the casks to form a thick blanket on the wine's surface. This shields the wine from further contact with the air (preventing oxidisation, so giving fino its pale straw colour) and imbues it with a dry, fresh, almondy nose.
- To produce oloroso, the newly fermented wine is fortified to 18 per cent abv before it enters the solera - a strength which prohibits the forming of flor. Again, air is left in the cask, though the absence of flor promotes the oxidisation that causes the wine to darken. Very old oloroso is so dry and so fully oxidised as to appear bitter, so it is often sweetened with PX, a kind of sherry made from the treacly juice of sun-dried grapes of the Pedro Ximénez variety.
Sherry styles
From the palest to the darkest, and the driest to the sweetest...
- Fino Made from Palomino grapes and matured under flor.
- Manzanilla Made from Palomino grapes and matured under flor in the seaside bodegas of Sanlúcar.
- Amontillado A fino that has been aged to the extent that its flor has been exhausted and so has matured in contact with the air.
- Oloroso Made from Palomino grapes that have been matured and aged in contact with the air.
- Pale Cream A blend of fino and sweetened Palomino wine.
- Medium A blend of amontillado and PX wines.
- Cream A blend of oloroso and PX.
- Pedro Ximénez Made from from extra-sun-ripened PX grapes.