If truly European wine does exist, it would be Jerez wine. It is known in English speaking countries as ‘sherry’ and in French speaking countries as ‘Xeres’. It is made in wineries located in the extreme south of Europe, in Spain. Its elaboration and commercialization was conceived mostly by European families that had come to the country in the eighteenth century. That is why its most famous brands have long been Domecq (originally from France), Osborne and Garvey (England) or Terry (Ireland).

Jerez wines used to be elaborated like in the rest of Europe: every year’s harvest was fermented by oxidation and was then bottled. Every bottle was identified with the year it was harvested. However, since the eighteenth century, Jerez wines were not submitted to a static ageing, but to a dynamic ageing system, through the ‘soleras’ (sedimentation) system. Wines from different harvests are combined in American oak wineskins in an organized, systematic and balanced way, and ‘not the French way, because it is porous while Jerez wine needs humidity,’ according to Rafael Osborne, the PR chief at Osborne, who we meet in Santa Maria port. Therefore Jerez wines have a ‘middle age’ and organoleptic characteristics that are always identical.

(Illustration: María Luque Crespo)

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More consumers outside Spain

‘The wine’s ageing and fermentation process accelerates when you mix recent harvests with older ones,’ a trend that was first introduced to ‘satisfy the demand that Englishmen had for medium sweet and aged wines,’ says Rafael Osborne. Not surprisingly, England is the largest consumer of Jerez wine (32% of the market share), followed by the Netherlands (23%). Spain only comes third with 22% of the share. Furthermore, the Netherlands has the highest market share for brandy, the wine liquor from Jerez, whose name comes from the Dutch brandewijn meaning ‘burned wine’.

According to the Jerez wines regulating council, one out of three Jerez wine bottles is consumed during spring time, the season of rebirth. Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving or Harry Potter writer JK Rowling have cited these wines in their work, but we will quote the famous Scottish doctor Alexander Fleming: ‘if penicillin cures sicknesses, Jerez resuscitates dead people.’