Sherry again
Sherry again
Ver mensaje de GastronautaFollowing Jose’s suggestion, I’d like to retake the sherry storage issue. Availability of sherry at bars/restaurants is indeed far from a good thing if the product is in less than impeccable condition. In the case of a long-open/poorly stored bottle I’d much rather NOT have the wine available than sample a long-dead product I may then reasonably decide ";I don’t like.";
It’s a shivering thought to imagine the number of wine-oriented Americans who visit Spain every year and might ask for a fino or manzanilla only to find the subproduct/corpse and hence decide they don’t ";get"; it... Would they ever try this again? Where? In the States, where there might be even more of a reasonable doubt about storage?
The truth is that a bottle of top-quality mass-produced fino (say La Ina or Tío Pepe, we’re not talking El Maestro Sierra here) costs virtually nothing to a restaurateur. A decent restaurant will charge no less than 3€ per glass of fino as an aperitif, and that’s the price of a half-bottle. I would open a new bottle every day at least in order to have fresh fino/manzanilla readily available. It would do very little harm and would ensure costumer satisfaction as well as great PR with the sherry house. What the hell, I might even have the whole thing partly subsidized by the bodega!
But no. What we normally find is ";that bottle"; brought to the bar by a distant relative to celebrate some long-forgotten event. With those practices the public will only get into sherry as an act/leap/double sommersault of faith.
Thank Heaven now they’re disguising botlling dates in the labels, but of course the very codification speaks poorly of the producers’ attitude toward consumers: if they ARE effectively revealing bottling dates ...why not do it openly??? Well, it only makes sense if they KNOW most consumers DON’T care, so they do it discretely for those in-the-know (instead of teaching us all to be in the know, and winning us for the market).
Well, that was my rant...
Re: Sherry again
Ver mensaje de GastronautaFreshness and oxidation are issues whenever any wine is served by the glass at restaurants or bars. It is not unique to sherry. Perhaps there is more confusion about sherry because some mistakenly believe that finos and manzanillas are as sturdy as olorosos or PXs.
Just a couple of days ago the British newspaper, The Telegraph ( www.telegraph.co.uk ) had an artlcle about trying to change perceptions of sherry in the England. It’s funny to me that this is viewed as a big issue in England because, from my perception as an American, sherry is far more common in England than here in the US. I would not be surprised if more sherry is exported to England than to the larger market of the US.
One can read the whole Telegraph article on line, but you have to first register. Here are some relevant parts:
";Sherry’s reputation as a sickly tipple for the elderly boozer is depriving British drinkers of a characterful partner for all kinds of food, says Andrew Catchpole....
Food-friendly: good-quality sherry
A sticky encounter with a sickly cream sherry at Christmas has spoilt it for a whole generation. This is a terrible shame. If only more of us tried good-quality sherry, many, I think, would pass on the Chardonnay.
Sherry is a fantastic, food-friendly wine, as the Spanish have long known. My own conversion took place one baking hot summer while travelling in sherry country in the west of Andalusia. In towns such as Seville and Jerez, locals wash down dishes of plump prawns and paprika-infused octopus with chilled half-bottles of bone-dry fino or salty, tangy manzanilla.
Others prefer the rich, nutty, dry bite of amontillado or oloroso to bring out the melting sweetness of Pata Negra ham. To round things off, there is the sweet, raisiny intensity of Pedro Ximenez (PX) or the grapey ripeness of Moscatel, perhaps poured over vanilla ice cream.
It felt as if I was being inducted into a secret gastronomic club. Earlier brushes with syrupy old cream sherry hadn’t begun to hint at the intriguing flavours of these wines. Fortunately, the growing British interest in Spanish food has seen many restaurants champion sherry. At the moment the trend is largely confined to a few London-based places, such as Fino, Moro and Cigala, but it may catch on elsewhere.
A favourite haunt of mine is the long zinc bar at Moro, an Andalusian-meets-North African restaurant in Clerkenwell. A juicy leg of Pata Negra ham sits on the bar, tapas are dispensed, and the clatter of the kitchen announces the arrival of aromatic dishes infused with herbs and spices such as paprika, saffron and coriander. Tristan Appleby, the bar manager, is usually on hand to advise diners on the dozen sherries on offer.
";We encourage food and sherry pairing and find a lot of people, especially adventurous younger customers, give it a try,"; he says. ";The dry fino and manzanilla sherries are great aperitifs with tapas and the amontillados and olorosos work well with meatier dishes such as cecina, an oak-cured beef, or traditional pork stews."; The trick, says Appleby, is to get people to see sherry as a wine and ";not just a dusty old has-been that belongs in grandma’s cupboard";.
Sherry is a fortified wine, a term that sends out the wrong message to a health-conscious generation. In fact, a lighter fino is only moderately stronger than many alcohol-laden New World wines. Sherry’s powerful character - which makes it so adaptable to highly-flavoured Mediterranean dishes - is the result of the complex process by which it is made.
The delicate finos of Jerez and sea-fresh manzanillas, from the seaside bodegas of Sanlucar de Barrameda, develop a yeasty tang from a flor - a layer of yeast - that grows on the wine in the barrels. After this, it gets a little confusing. Amontillados start life as finos, but the flor fails to develop. In the case of oloroso, it was never there in the first place. So a darker, nuttier character develops duri
Re: Sherry again
Ver mensaje de WaltZalenskiWell, as far as I know, in El Bulli the wines usually recommended are not sherries so maybe Ferran should speak with his team ;)))
Re: Sherry again
Ver mensaje de Paco HigónBut you get the point: (many) newcoming Americans are obsessed with food pairing yet they practice the try-to-cook-something-for-this-15%-Alc-Chardonnay game instead of paying attention to the time-sanctioned matches that come to us as ";natural"; pairings.
Myself I’m not exactly the champion of fino and manzanilla. I’m more for the oxidative styles, but that’s surely because of my origin in the Canaries where no sherry at all is/was habitually consumed. Since my arrival here I’ve managed to track down a few examples of the legendary manzanillas (Pastrana, San León) to broaden my experience. But the oxidative stuff also happens to be excellent with food, if not, perhaps with pescaíto frito certainly with ibérico (remember the amontillados at the Encuentro with those slices of Joselito/SRC?) and game dishes.
PX is a must. I may easily have 5 different bottles at home...and I know I could open them all without risk of oxidation! That unbalances the concept of QPR by introducing a totally new aspect.
And last night I had a superb glass of Hidalgo’s Palo Cortado Viejísimo. I opened the bottle in Tenerife with David-G and Carmen, and reserved a half-bottle to bring back to Ciudad Real. Arrived by plane 8 days ago and is drinking beautifully. This morning the empty glass was a treat to smell side by side with my coffee...
I mean there are sherries to drink now and sherries to keep, sherries for virtually all kinds of food, sherries in the 3-8€ range and sherries above 100€, sherries transparent and black, drier than riesling and sweeter than ...riesling, you know all that, but we think we have a problem in the export market whereas in fact the home market is mostly ignorant about sherry beyond manzanilla...
Fino
Ver mensaje de GastronautaI certainly agree that sherries are underappreciated, and I’m sorry to hear that this is true in Spain as well.
It is perhaps a small matter in the context of this discussion, but I recently was treated to an eye-opening lecture/tasting by Joaquín Gálvez -- one point of which is that finos can easily be even better than they are. Specifically, tastings of fino just prior to the last aggressive filtration reveals a wine of obviously greater complexity. This complexity is routinely sacrificed for a clearer pale color (as opposed to a more golden hue).
Perhaps there are some ";en rama"; finos and manzanillas that do not suffer from this problem, but I understand they are quite rare.
One step ahead in my experiments...
Ver mensaje de GastronautaAs some of you know (everybody who read the spanish side ;) in the last few days I’ve tasted a Fino en rama (Toro-Albalá).
I bought it just for the oenocuriosity of taste a Fino en rama, ’cos I’ve never tasted before and the price (3 EUR and a bit) I can assume a plonk...
I spent a lot of time trying to guess and understand how to know the vintage of this fino (I mean ";la saca";) arf... Some crossposting and hours later (and thanks to the ref. given by Victor de la Serna to a Jesús Barquín’s post in... I-don´t-remember-what-forum) I learnt how to understand that odd & silly codes in the backlabel...
Well... it was a very (very) old bottle :( Anyhow its taste was astonishing for me... very strong... but it was so feble in nose and some hours after opened it was almost nothing but liquid :((((
I don´t know if it´s normal in this kind of finos... I’ve to taste more :))
It make me think that these wines, produced in our own country, without any kind of promotion... treated as Cinderella in any restaurant... givin’ us odd and ciphered vintage codes... For heaven’s sake!!! This is the worst way of sell a product whatever product you sell!!!
Regards,
Jose
Decidedly...
Ver mensaje de joseYou bet when I go to Córdoba I always ask for their en rama version wherever I go (oddly served only slightly under room temperature).
So far I’ve always considered the mystics (or mystique) of fino and manzanilla a nuisance in the sense that one always hears such things as ";No fino or manzanilla tastes the same above Despeñaperros"; and all that stuff, and finally this year--hopefully--I’ll be going to Vinoble and trying the real thing in Jerez. Not that I’d waste my time with dry wines in the expo but surely outside there’ll be no way to escape the much-awaited guidance of the experts here... :^)
Re: Decidedly...
Ver mensaje de GastronautaProbably after the overdose of sweet wines you’ll need a refreshing fino or manzanilla to ";reinitialise"; your brain ;)))