Stupendous Sherry!

The President of the Secret Sherry Society is pleased to present this week’s author on “Sherry Blogger of the Week,” Tim Vandergrift from WineExpert.

Each week we will feature a new wine blogger committed to sharing with readers their passion and knowledge of wine. If you are a wine blogger and are interested in being featured on our website please email us at secretsherrysociety@gmail.com.

Tim’s Take on Sherry

By Tim Vandergrift

I am perhaps the least likely Sherry enthusiast you could imagine. Born in a very small town in western Canada, I didn’t grow up drinking wine. Indeed, the only wine available in our community was screw-topped, vaguely soda-poppish, and heavy on the sugar and bubbles, but light on actual wine content. If this was wine, include me out.

Another influence was my family’s ethnic and religious background: on my mother’s side I come from a long line of Russian-Germans, observant of the Mennonite faith. If you’re not familiar with the sect, think ‘Amish’, but not so friendly towards outsiders, or as open to new ideas. While long on community, family and church, they disapproved of beverage alcohol on general principles: alcohol beverages were not drunk to appreciate the subtle flavours and aromas. They were drunk stealthily, behind the barn, for the purposes of sneaking into the pool hall to lose the grocery money among loose women. These attitudes coloured how I felt about drinking as a lad. I grew up wanting to be like my old man, drinking beer from cans or Rye whisky mixed with cola, smoking unfiltered cigarettes taken from a pack tucked into the sleeve of my hoodlum-grade t-shirt.

And so it went, until I met the woman who would be my future wife. She came from a robustly mixed family, including French Canadian influences. They would no more sit down to dinner without wine on the table than they would sit down without cutlery or plates.

Under her influence I not only started to drink wine, I began to realize that I’d had it wrong all along—not only was wine delicious, it was more complex and challenging than mass-market beer or whiskey. I understood I’d been denied a birthright and vowed to make up for it. I drank richly fruity red wines at first, and gradually sought out stronger, more heavily extracted wines to drink, with more tannin, more oak and more alcohol. Pretty soon if it wasn’t California Zinfandel or Australian Shiraz, it wasn’t coming to my table. Certainly white wines were out, and dessert wines were neither dessert nor wine to me. And sherry? Well, I tried it once and it was thick, sticky and tooth-spinningly sweet. I thought it fit for waffles, or for reviving diabetics, but not for real men.

In a way, I was as closed to the possibility of wines as I was before, allowing only the narrowest interpretation of wine to define the whole world of the grape for me. I may have continued on like this for a long time, but for the generosity and wisdom of strangers.

I was on a solo cycling trip through the Gulf Islands of British Columbia in 1989, riding up and down winding hilly roads, soaking in some of the most breathtaking scenery in the world—cool green forests, shingle beaches, deep blue stretches of the Pacific, dotted with boats and killer whales and endless blue skies. I camped a bit, but whenever I got thoroughly dusty and saddle-sore I stopped at bed and breakfast places and basked in the sun and loaded back up on carbohydrates.

On one of the islands I was lucky enough to get in at a very eclectic bed and breakfast. The owner was a feral chef who cooked according to a complicated dedication to an arcane notion of historical authenticity, preparing ancient Roman meals that were so authentic that they didn’t include any ingredients not known to the time of Julius Caesar, or Medieval meals that included four-and-twenty blackbirds baked into a pie (I kid you not).

This might sound like a recipe for disaster, but on the contrary, the food was good, if a little odd, but it was continually engaging, in a way I hadn’t seen before. He had thought deeply what it meant to be both a cook and an eater from that time period, and wanted you to think about it too.

But the challenges of his meals aside, the hospitality was warm and open, and at about 4 pm every day drinks were served on the deck, which overlooked a gorgeous stretch of forest running down to the bay. By that time the stinging heat of the afternoon had moderated by the cool, salt-scented breezes from the Strait of Georgia, bringing with them hints of cedar, pine needles, red earth and clover, and the hummingbirds were actively zipping around the heads of guests, darting in an out of the cascades of flowers surrounding the space.

I had settled in to enjoy the view, feet up and perfectly content, feeling like I could have sat there for several years if the opportunity presented itself, when one of the staff came up with a tray and presented me with a small plate and a narrow tulip glass of white wine lightly beaded with moisture in the heat of the afternoon.

“Compliments of the house. Today we have a little tapas for you: almonds, house-cured olives Manchego cheese, and to go with it, a glass of Sherry.”

I had been with her right up until the Sherry, but it would be the work of a complete churl to refuse such a thoughtful offering. Besides, I could grit my teeth through a wee glass of pancake syrup to go with the tasty-looking snacks.

I picked up the glass and gave it an exploratory sniff. There was no caramel, no raisins, no burned sugar. Instead, I smelled sea breezes, a hint of nuts, like the ghost of particularly good hazelnuts, minerals and sunshine. Somehow through all the other smells of the forest and the flowers I could physically smell hot, sun baked earth full of chalk and gypsum and good red dirt, and something else I could not put my finger on. Suddenly my mouth watered—it smelled fantastic. Not fantastic in the sense of very good indeed, but fantastic in the sense that it seemed to have sprung from a very good imagination, one that could make up wine that had aromas worthy of a mystery novel.

I took a tentative sip. It was lightly chilled, but not ice-cold, and the first thing that hit me was the nuttiness. It was delicate and shy, but very persistent. It startled me that a wine could have an up-front flavour that didn’t rely on fruitiness! As that first sip flowed across my palate the acidity caught up almost immediately: this wine was crisp, but not actually tart, and immensely refreshing.

The flavours that came next left me dumbfounded. I already realised I was going to have to re-evaluate my ideas about Sherry, but the wine gave up wonderful minerality. Although it was pleasingly fruity, with citrusy notes and hints of stone fruit, there were cascades of carbonates and gypsum, making it seem drier than the beautifully balanced wine it really  was. And despite the delicacy of the flavours and the layers they formed, it was an incredibly robust wine, powerful and punchy.

It was almost absent-mindedly that I popped a couple of almonds in my mouth. They were still warm, crisped from the oven and dusted with a bit of sea salt. Paired with the Sherry they formed an amazing combination. The sweetness of the almond, its nuttiness and the bit of saltiness picked up everything that was so, so right with the wine. Right up until that moment I would never have believed that almonds were the perfect food to match with any wine. The cheese and the olives were revelations as well, their powerful, savoury flavours chased, wrestled, subverted and uplifted by this beguiling wine.

I found I had reached the bottom of my glass in less than a dozen minutes. Looking around somewhat embarrassed by my greedy gulping, I saw the owner approaching with the bottle. “Can you tell me what kind of Sherry this is?” I asked, hoping for a brand name so I could pick some up on my return home.

He smiled broadly and filled my glass again. “It’s my favourite Sherry of all, Palo Cortado. It’s not a very popular style around these parts, so I have to bring it in especially for myself and my guests. I’m very glad you’re enjoying it.” In examining the bottle I realised that Palo Cortado wasn’t a brand at all, but a style of Sherry, one I was obviously going to have to learn more about.

When I had time to look it up in my wine books at home, I found out that Palo Cortado was quite rare—no wonder he had to import it himself. I learned that Sherry is made from carefully aged white wines stored and blended in a complex system of casks. There are two ways the aging, a biological process where special yeast form a crust on top of the wine in a barrel, transforming the contents over time. The other process is chemical, where the wine oxidises away until it reaches the brown richness of sweeter Sherries. Palo Cortado is made with a combination of both, and strangely enough, it’s almost always by accident: the winemaker starts off to make a normal Sherry under the flor yeast, which (for mysterious reasons) collapses, leaving the sherry to enrich and darken in colour on its own. Accident or not, it was a happy circumstance that made such wonderful wine.

I left for home the next day, and that afternoon of tapas and sherry on the deck is a timeless memory for me, a nearly perfect idyll matched by a whole new world of wine opening to me.

The bed and breakfast is gone now, all these years later, but I’ll always have fond and grateful memories of it, and the lessons I learned. First, I shouldn’t judge a wine by a single example—maybe if I didn’t like a particular wine it wasn’t because it was bad, but rather that I simply hadn’t tried enough to form a proper opinion. Second, some wines had flavours and aromas that didn’t rely on  the brute-force approach of ripe fruit, tannin and oak to be delicious and complex, but rather showed delicacy, finesse and refinement—a powerful character in it’s own right.

And now I’ve got a bottle of Palo Cortado waiting in my wine rack—next to a couple of Finos, an Amontillado and a wee bottle of Pedro Ximinez. It seems I’m a convert.