MY SHERRY AMORE

Recently tried road-tripping across the south of Spain in search of the ultimate fortified wine. Well, sort of

Sylvia Mckeown

Finally we pulled into Jerez de la Frontera, the heart of Spanish sherry country. Literally, Jerez means sherry.

We had driven there from Seville, after a morning spent traversing the streets in the rain buying scarves, visiting a countess’s garden and spending some time under the Metropol Parasol, a giant mushroom-like wooden canopy that I had been obsessed with since it was erected in 2011.

But the whole reason I had rented a tiny Fiat 500 to begin with, was so that we could get to Jerez and go on a sherry road trip.

Sherry — for those who weren’t lucky enough to drink with their grandmothers — is a fortified wine; technically a concoction of fermented white grapes, sugar and yeast and a grape brandy called destilado. Your interactions with the liquor may have been limited to brushes with Sedgwick’s Old Brown at art exhibitions and opera events in Pretoria (I speak from experience here) but sherry actually has its roots firmly set in the Spanish countryside. In fact, if it’s not grown there, it can’t be called sherry — hence Sedgwick’s no longer carrying the “sherry” bit on its bottles.

Jerez’s winemaking prowess goes as far back as 1100 BCE and the Phoenicians. But it was the Moors, who ruled Andalusian Spain for hundreds of years from the eighth century, who used the area’s grapes in their distillation process. The sweet fortified wine’s history has played out like a paperback romance ever since; complete with prominent roles in city sacking, fires and insect plagues. It has been loved and claimed by more than its fair share of countries.

In Jerez we hit an obstacle to our sherry trip. All the bodegas are closed, but my mother is making big eyes at me. “Please can we go? It’s just down the road. I saw we passed the big yellow sign a little way back,” she begs me.