Jerez, in the province of Andalusia in southwest Spain, is the home of Sherry — the three words Jerez, Xérès and Sherry on every bottle reflect the Spanish region, the original Phoenician name and the English one.
Sherry is one of the five great wine classics alongside Port, Madeira, Champagne and Tokaji, and is arguably the most misunderstood and underappreciated of them; far from being a little old lady's drink, it is the daily drink of southern Spanish men.
As a fortified wine its alcoholic strength is raised to between 15 and 22 percent (a standard table wine is 12 to 15), and Sherries are additionally given slow, careful and systematic exposure to oxygen, the degree varying by style.
Nowhere else in the world are so many radically different styles of wine made from the SAME grape variety — palomino, which is fairly neutral when harvested, exactly the quality the solera process of fractional blending requires.
The vineyards spread in a triangle from an inland point north of Jerez de la Frontera to the maritime towns of Puerto de Santa María on the Bay of Cádiz and Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the Atlantic at the mouth of the Guadalquivir; the best sites lie in the heart of that triangle, the zone designated Jerez Superior.
It is an eerie, barren moonscape of blinding whiteness along the Andalusian coast — the stark, chalky-white shores from which Columbus began his westward sail, meaning Sherry was very likely the first European wine drunk in America.