JUST WILLIAMS
Maybe sherry’s decline has been overstated Sure, its sales are nowhere near the peak they achieved in the days of subsidies and a stampede for sweet, brown styles. But look carefully at the numbers behind the modern sherry industry and it’s possible that pessimism about the category is misguided, says David Williams
I
love sherry. And so, it seems, does everybody else in the wine trade. Actually, I’d go further than that:
for years, now, the trade’s love of the
great Andalucían drink has operated like a vinous equivalent of the Freemason’s handshake: if you got an affirmative
response to an offer of manzanilla you
knew you were safe, among friends, nudge, nudge, say no more.
Of course, the only reason this secret
code worked is that everyone in the trade knew that nobody outside the trade
really liked the stuff. In the real world in
which most people can’t tell a solera from
industry a great disservice to measure
impossible to shift.
this was a completely different era, and
a Solero, sherry was hopelessly passé,
its stereotypically geriatric associations If there’s been a certain revelling in
the insider status conferred by sherry
connoisseurship, there’s also been a fair amount of wallowing in the idea that
any contemporary sales gains against the
standards of 40 years ago. In so many ways not just in terms of consumer taste and fashions.
the years that we’ve been trained to greet
T
classic Croft Cream Sherry ads of the 1980s.
50 million litres to more than 150 million
sherry can never get back to its glory days.
The false dawns have come so often over
any flickers of a revival with a knowing
laugh, eyebrows raised like Jeeves in the Lately however
I’ve come to grow
a little tired of this
world-weary posture. It’s occurred to me that it comes from
an unrealistic view of what’s possible for a fortified
wine in the 21st
century. In my view, it does the sherry
THE WINE MERCHANT june 2021 22
he market conditions were
incomparable, too. Indeed, if you look at a graph of sherry sales
over the past century, you get a massive
post-war spike in the first 30 years from litres.
After that it’s like a chair’s been kicked
away, and the curve falls just as steeply
down, down, shedding sales all the way back down to 30 million litres.
As Ruben Luyten points out in a typically
incisive analysis of the numbers on his
indispensible Sherry Notes website, the end of the peak coincides with Spain’s
entrance to the EEC and the end of the
Spanish government’s generous subsidies to sherry producers, which had hitherto
