Our friend and wine-and-food expert, Emma, has often said that sherry wines are diverse and wonderful and misunderstood. She highly recommends exploring them with foods to discover their beauty. Which, of course, we did.
Before we get to a lovely sherry-pairing meal that we enjoyed in Seville, we’ll show you a bit of what we learned during a tour of one of the noted sherry producers in the town at the heart of sherry territory in Andalusia, Jerez de la Frontera. This is Lustau, a mid-sized sherry house, or bodega.
The English word sherry derives from the name of the town. In today’s Spanish, Jerez is pronounced approximately, hair-eth. The French word is xérès, which is pronounced approximately zair-ess. Perhaps you can hear the similarities.
One reason that Emma tries to get people to give sherry a try is that in the UK and America, in the 20th century, the broadly available sherries were very sweet and relatively inexpensive. When people mentioned sherry, they pictured older “aunties” and “grannies” having their “tipple,” perhaps a bit too often.
But in fact, sherry is much more than cheap cloying fortified wine.
Sherry has its own DOPs, or Protected Designations of Origin. These are the strict local requirements for grapes, vineyard locations, and methods of productions. Within these DOPs, these are the designations that are not the sweetest wines:
There’s a lot of complexity here! But we learned about a key distinction. In the photo, the lowest type, Oloroso, includes a process of fermentation that is completely about oxidation. Oxidation is the interaction of oxygen with chemicals in the fermented wine, and it leads to rich, nutty, caramelized, dry-fruit, and spicy aromas and tastes — these are some of the characteristics for which good sherries are noted. They pair very well with rich, fatty meats and fish.
In the photo, the top types, Fino and Manzanilla, include fermentation without oxygenation. The method used to protect the fermenting wine from oxidization is to maintain a capping level of yeasts between the wine and the air. That yeast is alive, eating the sugars in the young wine, turning almost all of it to alcohol. The result is sherry wines that are very dry, crisp, and acidic (in a good way!). They pair very well with fresh oysters and other seafood.
Sherry is a fortified wine. That means that distilled grape alcohol is added to fermenting wine to stop the fermentation and lock in both the level of sugars and alcohol. While conventional wines have alcohol levels up to about 15.5%, sherries have alcohol levels of at least 15% up to 22%, though most sit at the lower end of this range. This does mean that both in tasting sherries and enjoying them with food, one is advised to sip and taste and not gulp — or you won’t remember much of the meal.
Our host toured us through some of the sherry-aging buildings in Jerez. Unlike what we’re used to for aging conventional wines, these spaces are completely above-ground, with very high ceilings, all for very good reasons.
The region around Jerez typically gets very hot in the summer, with temperatures of around 40C or 104F. The high ceilings allow much of that heat to rise away from the casks. The floor is not paved; it is a kind of clay. During the hot periods, water is sprinkled on it; the soil holds the water and releases it slowly, which cools and humidifies the air close to the ground.
Which leads us to this three-tiered stack of barrels. The barrels in the photos are decades old, made of American oak. Unlike in conventional wine aging, where barrels are used for a few years and then sold to other kinds of spirits production, such as for whiskies, these barrels serve to keep the wine and oxygen connected, without pushing oaky flavors into the wines.
The nice tiers aren’t here just to look nice, their arrangement serves the multi-year oxidation process. Younger sherries go in the top barrels. Sherry-wine masters test them regularly and decide when some of the wine moves down into the second tier, which contains older wine. Similarly from the second tier to the third. The older the wines get, the more they are impacted by temperature and humidity, hence the care in placement and floor humidity. At all times, there is wine in these barrels, and wine can be left out oxidized for many years, even decades.
This process means that the sherry house can precisely manage the taste and aroma characteristics of the sherry wine to serve their market and customer needs.
One last wine-geeky tidbit, which is about terroir. Terroir is the French concept that connects the characteristics of wine to the place the grapes were grown. The soils, microclimate, surrounding ecosystem, sun exposure, and even vintner actions all contribute to the specificity of the wine. Another knowledgeable person we talked with in Andalusia commented that, for sherries, terroir is much less important than the location of the wine production and aging facilities. The region around the town of Jerez includes land very close to the Atlantic, as well as land further inland. The coastal environment can be cooler, more humid, more saline. Inland can be dryer and hotter. Sherry spends many years in the barrels. Oxidation connects the specific air of the facility to the wine. So, while terroir has some impact, the location of production and the practices of the sherry wine-makers have much more impact on the characteristics of the wine you ultimately get to enjoy.
Sherry is for tasting and enjoying.
We sought out a restaurant in Seville that offered the option to pair sherries with their menus. We found Sobretablas, and we had chosen well. The restaurant offered a grand tasting menu at a very reasonable price. However, we had succumbed to a typically Spanish late lunch that day, and even at 9 pm we weren’t hungry enough to handle a ten-course meal. We asked if their sommelier was willing to pair sherries with dishes we would order à la carte. Why of course!
The sommelier was an young handsome man who seemed genuinely to enjoy showing off lovely sherries. Just as Emma had told us many times, the combination of these wines with good local food can be spectacular.
November 2025