Why sherry is the perfect summer tipple
If you frequent hip wine bars in Clapton and Peckham, you’re probably already mad for sherry.
From white Burgundy-like, saline fino to the dark salted caramel of Pedro Ximinez, sherry — the fortified wine from the Andalusian city of Jerez, once the drink your granny asked for at Christmas — has had a revival in direct correlation with our appreciation of Spanish food beyond patatas bravas. It also happens to be the ideal summer drink, ice cold with a plate of jamon.
Jerez transported its sherry-soaked Feria de Jerez festival to London last month with the Feria de Londres aiming to take sherry mainstream. At the Jerez original, thousands of locals dressed in their finest flamenco ruffles come to the caseta bars to sing, dance, ride horses and fight until 5am while drinking two million bottles of Tio Pepe. London’s appetite for sherry might not generate the same numbers of empty bottles, but the capital is still awash with the stuff. The new wave of brilliant Spanish restaurants has made us crave that sweet, salty wine with our tapas, from hazelnut smokey Amontillado at Brat to super tangy Manzanilla La Gitana at Sabor and Barrafina. We have dedicated sherry bars, in the form of Sack and King’s Cross’s tiny Bar Pepito.
The fortified stuff is also being poured in new wave cocktails: Tio Pepe recently held a global cocktail challenge in which Cameron Moncaster from The Mandrake knocked out a Sea, Spice, Citrus and Soil, blending the en rama sherry (a natural wino’s dream of a drink, unclarified, unfiltered and sea spray-salty) with blood orange sherbert, saffron, bergamot liqueur and sparkling water.
The thing with sherry is that it’s democratic. It goes with pretty much every food; notably, it’s the perfect fish-and-chips accompaniment and the only drink that goes with ketchup. Even better, a £10 bottle can be opened and kept in the fridge far longer than your average wine, so you can quite happily crack open a bottle for a single glass. Although sherry is so smashable you’d be forgiven for sinking the whole thing on a summer evening.
