Are restaurants missing a trick with sherry? We longstanding wine lovers all know that sherry goes brilliantly with Spanish food, not only as a de rigeur aperitif with toasted almonds, crisps and olives, but also throughout a meal with anything from grilled prawns to robust meaty stews and anything involving chorizo.
What’s less well known is how good sherry is with other cuisines, and how appealing it can be to youthful and adventurous drinkers, which is why it is something all savvy restaurateurs should have in their sights.
Restaurants and chefs are becoming far more adventurous with sherry and food pairings
A few weeks ago I had an almost biblical revelation, and in the most modest of circumstances. For dinner on a Tuesday I frugally ate the remains of the previous night’s takeaway Sri Lankan prawn curry and fancied just a little glass of something with it.
There were the dregs of a bottle of González Byass' ‘Leonor’ 12-year-old palo cortado in the fridge, left over from a paella-based lunch party a fortnight previously where I’d served it in the garden with good pata negra ham, toasted almonds and Mini Cheddars to kick off the proceedings and, predictably, they had all made very happy pairings with the wine.
What was less predictable was the bullseye match the sherry made with the curry. Its warm (rather than fiery) spicing softened by coconut milk sat absolutely perfectly with the sherry’s layered nutty, slightly lactic notes while its bright acidity cut through the oily richness. I asked my millennial lodger to try and she, who’d never drunk sherry before, too was blown away.
So in the selfless interest of research, I stocked up on different styles of sherries and we’ve been experimenting over dinner very successfully since then.
Sherry pairings
Manzanilla and fino, the driest styles, are aged for at least two years under their blanket of flor which prevents oxidisation and imparts its distinctive yeasty tang to the wine.
Barbadillo’s Solear manzanilla and Gonzalez Byass’s Tio Pepe are my choices as affordable, benchmarks examples. A flaky Greek spanakopita, simple lemony pasta and an oily Niçoise salad were all big hits with both wines.
Amontillado, which is left longer in the barrel so the flor dies off and the wine beings to undergo oxidative ageing, has a deeper colour and takes on some woody, vanilla-tinged notes from the oak as it ages.
We really enjoyed Waitrose’s Blueprint Amontillado, made by Sánchez Romate, with a bitter leaf, blue cheese and walnut salad dressed with walnut oil, a punchy caponata, and as a dangerously moreish companion to last Sunday’s roast chicken.
Sherry Wine Week in November will the be chance for restaurants and bars across the country to show what they can do with their Sherry and food pairings
Oloroso is usually produced from the second pressing of the grapes and fortified to an abv level where flor doesn’t grow so it ages only oxidatively, developing dried fruit, tobacco, wet leaf and balsamic traits as it does so. We put a bottle of Morrisons ‘The Best’ Oloroso, made by Lustau, to the test and it served very well indeed with a bavette steak, chips and bearnaise sauce, a North African-spiced vegetable tagine as well as an unseasonably hearty confit duck with dauphinoise potatoes. It also elevated a lowly cheese-on-toast supper to something quite special.
Dry styles are made from the palomino grape while pedro ximénez is used for most sweet sherries, harvested late and/or left to dry before pressing to give the uber-sticky sweet wines, famously described as being ‘liquid Christmas pudding’. Less sweet, and more to my taste, are cream sherries (a blend of PX and Oloroso) and those made from moscatel which are beautifully floral and fragrant.
Lustau’s East India Solera was my pick for a sweet style and it ticked so many boxes - a classic lemon tart, the last of the summer strawberries dolloped with whipped cream, a classy aged comté and, as Ellie the lodger admitted rather sheepishly, a midnight feast of milk chocolate Hobnobs.
Noble Rot experience
Noble Rot is a big fan of Sherry with lots of options and food pairing available in its different restaurants
At Noble Rot’s Soho branch, general manager, Emma Swift, and her team are enthusiastic sherry pushers.
“We often make a sherry one of the wines on the cheese pairing - that’s a no-brainer - and I'm constantly overhearing staff recommending sherry to go with the chicken liver parfait choux buns,” she says.
“And I think sherry goes brilliantly with our chicken in vin jaune with morels. Equipo Navazos’ La Bota 121 Palo Cortado is amazing with it, but you don’t really need to spend loads of money. All the ageing and complexity you’d spend a fortune to find in any other wine just comes as standard with all sherries.”
On the other hand, you could go to the Ritz and pay £50 for a 10ml spoonful of Gonzalez Byass’s ‘Leon XIII’ PX, a single barrel of already old wines blended to celebrate the election of the Pope in 1878.
All the Noble Rot branches have impressive sherry lists, some by the glass but most by the (often 375ml or 500ml) bottle, from Lustau’s sparky, newly released en ramas (bottled straight from the barrel with no filtration) to rare and venerable bottlings from esteemed names such as Maestro Sierra and Valdespino.
“To be honest, it’s mostly people in the wine and hospitality trade who drink these top-end wine wines,” says Swift. “A very good sherry isn't generally something you fall into without a bit of pre-knowledge. We all love it, and love enlisting new converts.”
Sherry education
There is now so much information for restaurants and chefs to use on the Sherry Wines website
So how to introduce new drinkers to sherry, and bump up sales of this most versatile but under-rated of wines? Staff education is essential, of course. The Sherry Academy has useful guidance for professionals on their website and remember sherry distributors are usually keen to help with training.
When it comes to getting customers hooked, Paul Shepherd, head of on-trade and specialist retail at Gonzalez Byass UK, thinks sweet sherries are the easiest to place on lists in non-Spanish restaurants - they go so well with chocolate or dried-fruit puddings or simply poured over ice cream - though he’s very enthusiastic about the increasing awareness of dry styles.
“I’ve done thousands of tastings, both with consumers and restaurant staff; I always tell them that sherry can be anything from the ‘driest wine on the planet to the sweetest’ and that really gets people interested,” he says.
“I think the word ‘sherry' can be a bit intimidating to new recruits, as can ‘fortified’, so I suggest putting dry styles in your unfortified white wine list, and using the word ‘Jerez’ rather than ‘sherry’. If customers see it as a white wine, they’ll drink it as one, which is how it works best with food, and I recommend it as a 125ml serve in a standard wine glass to make the most of the incredible aromatics.”
At recent consumer events, Shepherd has seen interest from millennials grow, who see its as a ‘new’ discovery. Sherry drinking is fairly rare among their parents’ generation, so with them it doesn’t carry the baggage of being an ‘old person’s’ drink. Although drinking in general among younger generations has generally declined, they are spending more when they do indulge, and are known for enthusiastically embracing the natural and orange wines which so often have a similar register to sherry in terms of their nutty, oxidative qualities.
On-trade experiences
Bar Valette from the Clove Club has a big focus on Sherry
At Bar Valette, Clove Club’s new baby in east London, their blackboard simply promises “lots of sherry” and their 20+ bottles of sherry are placedon a page on their list titled ‘Vino Generoso (Dry Sherry), Under Flor, Sous Voile & Oxidative Wines’ along with intriguing wines from Jura, Madeira, Italy and the Loire. This is helpful guidance to sherry's flavour profile that sits so well with their European-accented modern British cooking.
There are also two vinos de pasto on Bar Valette’s main white list - unfortified palominos aged under flor, a style having a quiet renaissance that’s even reached our shores - at Sandridge Barton in Devon, Duncan Schwab has produced a single barrel of Pinot Blanc aged for two years, also under flor, and it’s absolutely wonderful.
Do I hear the murmmerings of another trend emerging, niche though it may be?
Owen Morgan, owner of the Bar 44 Spanish restaurants in Wales and Bristol, is an official sherry ambassador and has been advocating for it since he opened his first site, in Cardiff, in 2002. He serves flights of sherries to introduce new drinkers to the category, which come with Top Trumps-style cards containing bullet-point information on each wine. “People seem to love learning something new that way,” he says.
Cocktails are really useful to keep up turnover of finos and manzanillas which lose their pizazz after a few days. Rebujito (dry sherry on the rocks topped up with lemonade and/or soda, garnished with lemon and/or mint) is the simplest, and one of the most delicious sherry-based aperitifs and, let’s face it, is very instagrammable, too.
Sherry often also makes a pleasing substitute for vermouth in cocktails; cream sherry works brilliantly in a negroni, while Bar Valette uses manzanilla in their Tuxedo Martini, and Owen recommends a slug of PX as an addition to an espresso martini - and he gets through cases of it each week..
Owen also keeps the sherry flowing with weekly Fino Fridays - nibbles of fried things served on the bar with a glass of fino for less than a tenner. “Sure, this fits with our Spanish theme here, but sherry is so versatile there’s no reason at all it couldn’t work with so many other styles of food as well,” he adds.
By way of demonstration, Owen is teaming up with Masterchef champion Ping Coombes for a dinner matching sherries with her wonderful Malaysian food on September 30 at Bar 44 in Bristol, the second in a series of supper clubs run by Sherry Wines.
Ravinder Bhogal hosted the first Sherry Club evenings as part of the Sherry Week celebrations by Sherry Wines at Jikoni Club in London
Read all about the first one, at Ravinder Bhogal’s Jikoni restaurant, written by our own Henry Jefferies here on The Buyer https://www.the-buyer.net/tasting/wine/ravinder-bhogal-sherry-food-pairing.
It seems such events are becoming something of a thing - Bar Valette have a Sardines & Sherry party on October 7 at featuring Valdespino’s very fine sherries (link to follow), while November 4 sees a collab with José Pizarro and MOB’s chef Ben Lippett at Lolo on Bermondsey St (link to follow).
This is music to my sherry-loving ears, but what has brought me even greater joy was Ellie and three of her friends returning home last weekend brandishing a bundle of fish and chips and a bottle of Tio Pepe. It seems the kids are all right, and the smart ones are switching to sherry. Listen up, hospo world.
* Restaurants and bars will be showing what exciting things they can do with sherry and food as part of the International Sherry Week 2025 between November 3-9. To find out how to get involved and what is happening click here.
