I went to the big En Rama sherry tasting in New York a couple weeks ago, with about 40 producers in attendance, and it was eye opening, so I wrote about it.
Many say that vinos de pasto will be the answer to the current sherry crisis. These unfortified new-wave wines have already become very popular among wine drinkers in Spain. The term covers a wide range of winemaking techniques, some made completely by traditional biological aging under flor—and some made with a little bit of flor, produced more like a still table wine.
As of 2022, vinos de pasto were permitted by Jerez’s Consejo Regulador to be bottled within the appellation. The official status of vinos de pasto was part of a larger bucket of new regulations that happened in Jerez two years ago These changes were in response to the sad state of the sherry market, which has been in decline since the 1980s. Vineyard land for sherry has cratered from about 70,000 acres to just 15,000. According to some reports, more than 40 percent of the fino sherry in Spain is consumed solely during various spring and summer festivals in Andalucia, mostly in rebujitos. Many suggest that the main industry of Jerez now is in seasoning sherry barrels for the whiskey industry. It’s said that Macallan now controls nearly half the cooperage in the region.
So what is the way forward for Jerez? As with other legacy wine regions in crisis, many believe it’s about thinking smaller, and being more focused on terroir—something that’s rarely talked about in Jerez. For decades, the focus in Sherry has been about the barrels, the solera system, and classifications based on age. I had visited the region a half dozen times over a decade before anyone ever took me to a vineyard. That is changing. “What does sherry mean?” asked Willy Pérez of Luis Pérez. “Every generation has to define what sherry is. We are just one generation, and we have the heritage of many previous generations.”