How to Taste Sherry - Part 2

Oloroso itself never had flor and has spent its entire life oxidising gently away. The result is a robust wine of more weight, body, colour, implied sweetness, and pretty full aroma. It has no flor aromas at all, obviously, but you can’t miss the savoury chestnut, walnut and old furniture aromas! As they age, Olorosos also get more concentrated, meaning they can get quite lean, and can develop astringent woody notes, so sometimes a trace of PX is blended in before bottling.

Moscatel is generally made in two ways. Either the sweet juice is fortified thus preserving the primary grapey aromas and the natural sugars producing a young fresh tangy wine, or the grapes are dried in the sun to raisins and the juice is fortified still preserving the sugars, but producing an altogether different wine. The latter is still grapey but also raisiny, more concentrated, and oxidation from sun-drying and long ageing will be there too, as well as enhanced complexity.

Pedro Ximenez is also sun-dried to raisins and also has that raisiny aroma and flavour. It is normally aged longer than Moscatel and therefore more concentrated. In both PX and Moscatel made from dried grapes, there is a little more tannin from the stalk, which cannot be separated after drying. In PX there is quite an array of aromas, some fruity and some phenolic. The former are raisins, figs, prunes, with the attendant texture of dried fruit, and the latter are toasted aromas such as coffee, chocolate, treacle.

Whenever you taste a wine as versatile as Sherry, think what dish it would marry with. There is a Sherry to match each and every dish you could come up with. Not only that, but Sherry makes the perfect aperitif as well as the perfect post prandial. You need never drink anything else!!