On a trip to London last week, I tried to get a feel for how consumers might see sherry. Just ordinary consumers, not the sorts who buy wines from expensive West End merchants. Of course, this exercise was totally unscientific. In between errands and meetings, I dropped into as many shops as I could to get an idea of what a potential sherry drinker might experience. I stupidly forgot my camera at home, and the pictures my phone produced are simply not up to scratch for this post. So you will have to do with this picture of Tio Pepe and the amusing advert down below.

Anyway, the value wines account for the largest part of the steady decline in sherry sales and since most sherry in the UK (largest sherry market) is sold through the the supermarkets, these were necessarily my main ports of call. All the supermarkets I went into had house brands, which seemed to be fully representative, even including Amontillado and Oloroso wines (this surprised me). Tio Pepe was ubiquitous with Croft Original and Harvey’s Bristol Cream popping up in most places, including even smaller off-licenses (bottle stores), but not so much in the off-license chains, like Oddbins and Majestic. I’m certain if you ask any Briton to name a sherry, one of these three brands above will come up.

Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket, has their house brand produced by Zoilo Ruiz-Mateos (part of Grupo Garvey). The Tesco packaging did nothing for me (nor did “Bodega Jerezana” at Waitrose and Sainsbury’s “Taste the Difference”) but I was not really expecting own-branded goods to do much. I’m sure the wines in these own brand bottles are very good but I could not help thinking that buyers own brands can’t be doing sherry any favours, …

This weekend, we built a wine rack. When we first moved to Terrassa almost 3 years ago, we were regularly lacking in wine as a result of less income, less samples and less travel. Consequently, we never had a formal wine rack. But when you change any one of these factors, you end up with a lot more wine. Now imagine if you changed all three like we have?! We not only needed to figure out where to store it all, but also how to inventory it. I still have most of my cellar in Cellartracker, though I quit putting in my tasting notes. I like Snooth and Adegga as well, but they both need better cellar management for me to move to them exclusively. Since this past weekend we created the wine rack, maybe next weekend we’ll inventory the wine. Let’s see what happens.

As for building the wine rack, it actually turned out to be much easier than we expected. Odd note though: untreated, uncut, plain wood costs more than planed, beveled whole sheets of wood here in Terrassa. So instead of needing to sand and polish it, we simply bought nice sheets of solid, shelving wood and then cut it to fit. Yet, we still need another. So later today, I’m off to buy some more wood for wine rack number two!

Enough about housing. Next Monday, we’re off to judge wine blogs! It feels a bit odd to mention, after we realized at the EWBC that judging a wine blog is quite subjective once you get past the aggregators and plagiarizers. Once into the meat of the blogging world, where the hard work and effort is being …

Officially, we are melting into the Catalunyan soil. Temperatures have risen up to 94 degrees F, which may not be that hot many of you suffering in 100+ degree temperatures, but after 2 months of rain and chilly temperatures, this seems like a sauna to us poor folk.

Yet, despite the toasty weather, its exciting to finally ring in the season with our first bottle of Manzanilla. La Bota De Manzanilla #8 “Las Cañas”, by Equipo Navaras, is from the oldest manzanilla in the house of M. Sánchez Ayala, situated in the Barrio de la Balsa in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. This much I know to be accurate, but if you look at the bottle, listing the number “8″ and “Las Cañas” on the left hand side of the bottle, with “La Bota de Manzanilla” on the right hand side of the bottle, it tends to get a little confusing as to what this all means. Let’s see if I can sort it out a bit to give a little clarity to their story.

First off, Equipo Navaros is comprised of a group of sherry lovers who happened by a dozen old, and especially tasty, butts of amontillado in Sanlucar that had been left to age flawlessly without being sold. Seeing an opportunity in the making, they bottled the equivalent of one “butt” and sold it under Edgar Allen Poe’s famous short story, “The Cask of Amontillado” (highly suggest reading this wonderfully creepy story!). After experiencing the success garnered from this small 600 bottle production among friends and family, they continued seeking more rare sherry treasures, which resulted in two additional selections in 2006. Clearly, their success extended outside the bounds of their immediate circle, …

Recently, I have seen on the web a number of “wine writers” who have dismissed sherry as wine “not drunk by Spaniards” and “better left to Grandma at Christmas”. I’m shocked and a bit irked. Why has such a noble beverage taken a back seat in the world of wine? Sherry should not be disregarded so off-handedly. Sherry in its seemingly infinite forms is a drink that I feel I need to defend and perhaps explain a bit.

Now I’m not saying that everyone is dismissing sherry, just those outside of the 5-10% of us geeks that read trade publications, and follow wine bulletin boards more closely than our own heart rate. In fact, in Robert Parkers last issue of his Wine Advocate, he gave rave reviews to 3 different bodegas and the scores ranged from 87 points all the way up to 96 points. Whether you agree with Parker’s scores or not, if someone with so much knowledge about wine can put a sherry in the same league as a first growth Bordeaux, maybe there is something to be said for it.

So what is sherry?

The simplest answer is that Sherry is fortified (generoso) wine made from white grapes in the area surrounding Jerez de la Frontera in the region of Spain known as Andalucía. It also happens to be one of the oldest wine making areas in all of Spain. The name Sherry itself comes from an English corruption of the word Jerez, pronounced: he-reth. Looking closer, the DO of Jerez is made of three regions: Jerez de la Frontera, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and Puerto de Santa María, each of which produces their own unique style.

The region is …