Eat Dessert First: Part 2, Sherry

Wednesdays on the BottleBlog will feature an education session on wine, beer or spirits. Today Shannon Spare presents the second in a series of blogs about dessert wines.

While I'm including Sherry in my dessert wine series, it's actually a versatile wine. It can be enjoyed as an aperitif, and it's also a common cooking wine. Like Oporto and Port, and Champagne and... well, Champagne, true European Sherry comes from a region in southwestern Spain that has a unique winegrowing climate. It's a hot, dry region with cooling sea breezes, perfect for growing Palomino grapes, Sherry's main variety.

There are two main types of Sherry: Light and dry, or fino, and Full and dry, or oloroso. After the wines are fermented, they are examined by the winemaker for aroma, color and flavor to decide which of the two sherry styles the wine is to become. For a fino, the wine is fortified to about 15% alcohol. For oloroso, it's fortified to 18%.

The wines are then placed into casks, and a special yeast grows on the fino wines. This yeast protects the wine from oxidation, and contributes an aroma and flavor, and makes it thinner and more delicate. Because the wine doesn't oxidize here, it's susceptible to oxidation rapidly when you open the bottle, so you should consume fino Sherries within a day or two of opening them. This yeast doesn't grow on the oloroso Sherries, so it's unprotected from oxidation. In the dry climate of Spain, this causes some of the water in the olorosos to evaporate, creating a higher alcohol content, sometimes as high as 24%.

Sherry is aged in a really cool way called solera. What happens is that there is a series of casks full of wines of varying ages. When the young wines are ready for aging, some (no more than a third) wine is taken out of the then-youngest cask and moved to the next-youngest. Some of each age of wine is moved into the next, so that by the last, "oldest" cask, the wine is a blend of many, many years of Sherries. As each generation of wine is mingled with the next, and the next, and so on, the qualities are also intermingled so that the Sherries are always consistent in quality and style.

When a fino or oloroso is sweetened (often by adding the juice from other grape varieties), it becomes a sweet Sherry. The very popular Cream Sherry is a Sweet Sherry, which, contrary to its name, is not "creamy" at all, but very rich and are delicious on their own or paired with any dessert you are serving.

Truth be told, I haven't tried my first sip of Sherry yet, but I'm going to pick some up very soon. Are you a Sherry drinker? What would you recommend I try, and pair it with? Leave me a comment below!