This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Every Englishman has his second country — usually in southern Europe — where he dreams of escaping the misery and damp of Britain for la dolce vita or la belle vie. France and Italy tend to come out on top here though Greece and Portugal are also popular choices. 

For me, however, it has always been Spain. Perhaps it’s my ease with the language. Not that I’m good at it, I just feel less of a tit trying to speak Spanish than I do French. Whenever I land in Spain, feel the warmth on my face and hear a lisped “c” or guttural “j”, I feel like I have come home.

Or perhaps it’s simply because I like cheap wine and good food. Last month my longing for Spain was particularly intense. It was a freezing April night, my wife and I ended up spending over £75 for a few tapas dishes and one (one!) glass of sherry at Barrafina behind King’s Cross station. I thought longingly of the heat of spring in Sanlúcar de Barrameda where you can pick at a plate of tortillitas de camarones, insanely delicious fritters made from tiny white shrimp, for three euros and a copita of manzanilla for €1.50.

Manzanilla is the driest and most delicate kind of sherry which people say picks up a salty tangy compared to fino from being aged by the sea in the bodegas of Sanlúcar. It’s aged under a layer of yeast known as flor which protects it from oxygen giving it an incredible freshness. 

I find it irresistible, once you’ve had one glass, it’s almost impossible not to have another (unless you’re in London where a tiny measure costs nearly £10.) There’s a local saying: one before eleven and eleven before one (o’ clock) and at those prices can you afford to be entirely sober? But it’s also a little sad that a wine that has been aged for around five years should be sold as cheaply as beer – a reflection of years of declining sales and the huge quantity of wines sitting in the warehouses of the once mighty sherry companies. 

But after years of slumber, turning out that same wine year after year to a decreasing customer base, the industry has woken up. Every spring bodegas like Hidalgo La Gitana and Gonzalez Byass release an en rama sherry. Rather than being blended and filtered this gives you the straight out of the barrel freshness that you get from visiting a winery and every year’s release is different. It’s like the difference between bottled beer and a well-kept real ale. 

There are other changes afoot. New regulations that were agreed in 2021 state that the lighter styles of sherry don’t need to be fortified as long as they reach 15 per cent of natural alcohol. Rather than being an innovation, this is how sherry used to be made before it was codified in the twentieth century. The new regulations have yet to be ratified by Spain’s EU overlords but Fermin Hidalgo, the eighth-generation owner of Hidalgo La Gitana, doesn’t care. When I saw him in London earlier this year, he told me he’s going to release his unfortified sherry whatever happens and if those penpushers don’t like it … It’s also not aged in a solera, the system of factional blending used to ensure that sherry is always a consistent product, instead it’s from a single vintage, 2017.

Again rather than being an innovation, this was once a traditional practice. Talk to people in the region and there’s a feeling that sherry lost its way somewhat in 1970s when it became standardised. Finos and manzanillas used to be much darker, richer wines but stainless steel fermentation, sterile filtering and shorter ageing robbed them of some of their character. Others think that the sherry region’s problems go further back: Ramiro Ibáñez from Cota 45, a tiny winery right by the Guadalquvir river in Sanlucar, explained that before phylloxera, the vine eating louse that destroyed vineyards in the nineteenth century, the region had over 43 grape varieties. When growers replanted it was usually with just one, Palomino Fino.

Ibáñez’s wines, which at the moment cannot be labelled as “sherry” because they are unfortified, are made from a variety of grapes and come from single vineyards, just how the better wines were sold in the past. Names like el Cuadrado would once have been as famous among wine connoisseurs as Meursault. Indeed, it might sound counterintuitive but with its creamy almond texture and lemony zing, Hidalgo’s unfortified 2017 wine has a lot in common with a good white Burgundy. 

For the first time in years, decades perhaps, there’s a real excitement about sherry. Vintage wines, single vineyard and en rama releases give wine writers something to cover rather than just tasting the same range from Gonzalez Byass and going, yup, still excellent. These wines have the personal touch. Fermin Hidalgo said to me that he is particularly excited about his unfortified vintage wine which should arrive in England later this year because he made it. You can’t point at most sherries and say that.

But this shouldn’t detract from what consistently excellent products are the likes of Tio Pepe or Manzanilla La Gitana. No region produces wines with such depth of flavour, in such large quantities and at such reasonable prices. Unless you’re drinking them in a bar in London.