10 minute read
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
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Ilove 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 a Solero, sherry was hopelessly passé, its stereotypically geriatric associations impossible to shift.
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 sherry can never get back to its glory days.
The false dawns have come so often over the years that we’ve been trained to greet any flickers of a revival with a knowing laugh, eyebrows raised like Jeeves in the classic Croft Cream Sherry ads of the 1980s. 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 industry a great disservice to measure any contemporary sales gains against the standards of 40 years ago. In so many ways this was a completely different era, and not just in terms of consumer taste and fashions.
The 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 50 million litres to more than 150 million 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
Sales of dry styles have held up – and even grown
rather distorted the industry’s profitability and sustainability.
Thereafter things never really recovered, but, as Luyten points out, that rather depends on what you mean by “recover”. Most of the sales lost were brazenly commercial sweet cream styles that were never the greatest ambassador for sherry, and which are certainly not missed by serious sherry lovers.
Meanwhile, sales of the dry styles, by contrast, held up. From time to time, they even showed a modest improvement.
Sherry, on this reading, was in the midst of reinventing itself, and coming to a more realistic understanding of its place in the world. Panning back to a longer view of its history, the so-called sherry boom of the mid-to-late 20th century was the outlier, the historical anomaly; the more modest returns sherry has now are the sustainable, realistic, historically consistent position.
All of which is not to provide excuses or offer too panglossian an assessment of what’s been going on in Jerez and the rest of the sherry triangle over the past 40 years: clearly, the industry, blinded and bloated by years of easy success, was much too slow in trying to arrest the decline and find new drinkers.
But it does provide a better, more accurate background against which to view the latest flickers of a revival in the UK. Statistical flickers such as the 20% spike in sherry sales in the UK as lockdown hit last March; the Co-op’s 70% sales rise in its premium sherry lines; Majestic’s jump of 75% last summer; and Waitrose’s 2020 growth of 20% for dry styles and 24% for sweet. Not to mention the many anecdotal (and Instagram) stories of sherry finding a place as a cocktail staple, a versatile food match and a lower-alcohol to brown spirits for late-night sipping.
And the fact is there is so much to enthuse about in sherry at the moment. The Consejo itself deserves credit for the introduction of the aged categories of VOS and VORS back in 2000, both of which have performed exactly as hoped: providing the classic bodegas, and discerning bottlers such as Equipo Navazos, with a pretext and framework for marketing the region’s greatest assets, those magnificent stocks of old wines.
But that’s only part of the story. The focus on the “raw” en rama category, with minimal filtration, pioneered by Barbadillo at the turn of the millennium, and taken up with aplomb by Tío Pepe and others since, has given the manzanilla and fino categories a new lease of life (literally given how “alive” those wines feel).
Then there is the arrival of celebrity winemakers, such as Peter Sisseck and Michel Rolland, both of whom now have sherry projects. Their vocal endorsement – the zeal of the newly converted – has done wonders for propagating an idea that we sherry lovers in the UK trade have long known all about: that great sherry isn’t a 1970s throwback, or some kitchy retro fad. As Sisseck says, “Without question, it’s Spain’s greatest white wine”.
Vermouth can be made in all sorts of places but its origins are in Piemonte, where Vermouth di Torino must be crafted to exacting standards under appellation rules. Scarpa vermouths are made more slowly than most, creating deep and complex flavours that impressed indies at a recent online tasting organised with The Wine Merchant
Piemonte wine producer Scarpa has something no one else has: an unfiltered extra dry vermouth made under the Vermouth di Torino appellation, the only such designation in Italy and one of only two in the world.
Though the vermouth-making tradition dates back decades, Vermouth di Torino was enshrined in legislation as recently as 2017, defining the area in which it can be made, the permitted base wines, and the 70-something herbs and other plant ingredients from which it can be made. Scarpa’s unfiltered extra dry joins more conventional bianco and rosso styles in the producer’s range and was created in collaboration with Michael Palij MW of UK agent Winetraders.
The producer and importer also teamed up for a Zoom tasting for readers to explore the range and gain an insight into what makes Vermouth di Torino special.
“Vermouth is a term everyone can use but it all stared in Piemonte,” says Palij. “It’s a region with this ideal combination of base wine and a magical garden of ingredients.”
Scarpa’s main point of difference in terms of production is its slow extraction time to get the aroma and flavour from the numerous fresh or dried roots, flowers, leaves, fruit and peel that go into making its vermouth.
Each producer has its own closely guarded recipe, though artemisia is the dominant ingredient.
At Scarpa, the extraction process lasts for between 30 and 45 days, at ambient temperature, which helps produce vermouths that retain their flavour and aroma for longer.
“The herbs and spices are ground by
Vermouth’s coming home
hand in an ancient coffee grinder. That hasn’t changed for 150 years. Then they are soaked in wine and neutral spirit, with pumping over 24/7,” says Palij. “That’s the key; the extraction is as slow as possible.
“Many other producers use extracts rather than dried botanicals – or if they do use dried botanicals, they heat the mixture and all those aromas don’t stay as long.”
The company also uses only DOCG Piemonte wines – 100% Cortese for the extra dry and Cortese with a maximum of 20% Moscato for the other two vermouths.
The colour difference between white and red vermouths comes not – as is often assumed – from the colour of the base wine. Both are made from white wine but the rosso takes its deeper shade from the addition of caramelised sugar and the darker colour of some of its natural plant ingredients.
“The real idea behind the extra dry started through wanting to create a product that was easy for people to understand, and an unfiltered vermouth was the answer. It has a haze that you couldn’t have with industrial vermouths made with heat extraction.
“That’s the proof for consumers that it’s made in an authentic way – and the genesis of the world’s first extra dry unfiltered Vermouth di Tornio.”
Scarpa’s Gregorio Ferro adds: “The sugar content in the extra dry is only around 30g per litre which is quite low for vermouth and only around half of the other vermouths. It is more bitter: you can smell grapefruit citrus and even some brine, like you get with olives.”
Edmund Skinner Smith of Winetraders draws comparisons between the extra dry and manzanilla sherry. “It’s got some complex flavours but it’s also very mature. It has mouthwatering bitterness but also freshness.
“It makes a great simple serve with tonic, so it plays into the trend for lower-alcohol drinks, with the complexity that you’d normally have to go to a 40% abv spirit to get, but with less than half the alcohol.”
He also suggests serving it neat and using an atomizer to spray a little extra virgin olive oil on the surface, which creates a marriage between the earthiness of the oil and the bitter grapefruit notes of the vermouth.
“The bianco is probably the most versatile of the three for cocktails,” adds Skinner Smith. “It hits so many notes. There’s the grapefruit citrus that runs through most vermouths and then an orange blossom character, and then sage and mint. It’s pulling you in so many different directions.
“With the rosso you’re not going to beat a Negroni but any of the classic cocktails that
use red vermouth, such as the Manhattan or the Martinez, are going to be elevated by this.”
He adds: “This is the time for vermouth. People are ready for all that complexity and length but with a little less booziness.”
Palij says that the 2017 recognition for Vermouth di Torino was long overdue. “Italy has been at the forefront of so many viticultural and oenological innovations and seldom gets any credit for them,” he says. “Finally, vermouth is getting the recognition it deserves – and that’s something to celebrate.”
MERCHANT VERDICTS
“We sell a lot of vermouth as it is a focus for us. They form the base of the majority of our aperitivo cocktails, usually with gin, vodka, bourbon or sherry.
“I liked all of the Scarpa vermouths. The extra dry has a great USP as an unfiltered bottling: super dry and bitter, which will be interesting for us in various twisted martini forms. We like vegetal and ‘dirty’ styles so this will work a treat.
“On the bianco front, a wetter martini plays on white negronis and a tall serve with tonic as an aperitif.
“The rosso, I want to think about a little. The flavour profile of cola, dandelion and burdock and bitter orange is an automatic Negroni choice, but I think it may lend itself to something that showcases its flavour profile as a standalone ingredient a little more.
Paul Morgan Fourth & Church, Hove
Kenrick Bush Urban Cellar, London
Feature sponsored by Winetraders
for more information visit www.winetradersuk.com or www.scarpawine.com Email michael@winetradersuk.com
