7.6.16 Díez-Mérito Appoints Sherry Women Honorary Ambassadors

Since the Espinosa family bought Díez-Mérito they have pulled the stops out. They took advantage of Vinoble, where they had a stand, to put the historic firm back on the map. They also organised parallel activities which included a reception at the bodega for the Sherry Women, who were appointed honorary ambassadors for Díez-Mérito wines.

The bodega’s oenologist, José Antonio Portales, gave the enthusiastic new ambassadors a tasting of the Bertola 12 year old range followed by the house jewels, the Amontillado Fino Imperial and the Oloroso Victoria Regina, both over 30 years old. Marina García González, president of Sherry Women, received the accreditation certificate as ambassadors from Salvador Espinosa, director general of the firm watched by César Saldaña, director general of the Consejo Regulador.

Díez-Mérito also offered a reception for nearly 50 importers and journalists from 14 different countries attending the commercial meeting with over 30 andalusian bodegas organised by the Andalusian Agency for Promotion Abroad (Extenda) in celebration of Vinoble.

The Power of the Sherry Women

The great New York fashion designer Kenneth Cole maintains that it is better to be noticed for what you wear in your soul than what you wear on your body. Only this way can one of his latest creations be understood: the New York Women’s Sherry Dress, cut stylishly with touches of urban sophistication with a weave reminiscent of fresh greenery and joy.

Kenneth Cole's Sherry Dress (foto:6pm.com)

The historic link between women and wine is forged by adventurers who worked hard and anonymously, by women who inherited bodegas and had the tenacity and capability to survive in a masculine and hostile territory. Jerez is full of examples from the past like la niña de la bomba, la reina del vinagre, Pilar Aranda or more recently Pilar Pla.

The journalist Juan Pedro Simo and the researcher Jose Luis Jimenez have analysed the sudden appearance of women managers, executives, oenologists, journalists, PR officers, venenciadoras and vine growers showing the social advancement of wine. Fatima Ruiz-Lassaletta, Paz Ivison, Victoria Gonzalez Gordon, Montse Molina, Maribel Estevez, Reyes Gomez are the magnificent pearls of infinite examples who reaffirm the pairing of women and wine.

In fact, this symbolic relationship began more than a century ago, according to the studies of  the historian Ana Maria Gomez Diaz in her well researched “La Manzanilla: Historia y Cultura de las Bodegas de Sanlucar”, which shows increasing feminisation since the XIX century. The aesthetic representation of wine is associated with the qualities traditionally associated with women such as paleness, delicacy, finesse and elegance. These attributes and their figurative representation can be seen in the brands. In 1927 in Sanlucar there were seventy brands, and half of them had feminine names, for example Manzanilla muy fina Pastora Imperio.

Wine is a sharing world which transcends its mere business and organoleptic aspects. In Spain we have needed to acclaim wine from multiple intellectual perspectives: musical, poetic, cultural. The culture and the soul of wine are civilising processes which make it great and which in the end produce sales, consumption and development of the industry.

In this context we remember an initiative born in Madrid which arose as a romantic necessity to evoke a love story: the Sherry Women. This desire to share inspired Sara Peñas to get together a group of women fiends linked to Sherry in the capital. Lovers of Sherry, these women see themselves as a round table with an absolute passion for discovering and enjoying soleras, and have become a lobby with the face of a woman. What began as a group of friends has grown to fifty women whose sole aim is to promote Sherry through a healthy, open, participative and modern network.

(@Sherry Women)

They could be surrounded by the sophisticated glamour of a wine shop in the Salamanca area of Madrid, or be at a journalist’s keyboard writing about the spirit of the Finos, or making the conscientious efforts of an oenologist, or be with the most charming “foodie”. We just need a Sherry Woman with her influence, conviction and passion to take on Manhattan, to spread the love of Sherry and fill Fifth Avenue with Amontillados. Not since Shakespeare mentioned Sherry in his works    giving it a place in international wine culture, has there been such an interesting and original idea, born of love, which could give Sherry a future and poetry, as that of these Sherry ambassadresses.

From an article in Diario Jerez by Jose Berasaluce Linares

The Women in the Sherry Trade

From an interesting article in the Diario de Jerez

In what has always been a masculine world there have always been women, though never as many as there are now. In the past they were generally inheritors of bodegas when their husbands died, and continued to run them successfully despite the men.

Widows like Teresa Reizo, widow of Francisco Ramon Mendoza of Jerez who inherited in 1817. At about the same time there was the widow of the owner of Victoria e Hijos in El Puerto de Santa Maria. The widow of Richard Sheild; in Sanlucar there was  Josefa Colom, widow of Eduardo Hidalgo; and Aurora Ambrosy Lacave who ran bodegas Pedro Romero between 1911 and 1921.

But there were two outstanding women - Pilar Aranda Latorre and Pilar Pla Pechovierto, both with similar problems and needs. Pilar Aranda was a widow with great strength of character and resourcefulness who decided to take on the traditional formality of the trade to give her sons a future in the family almacenista business starting with the 500 butts of some of the finest and oldest wines in Jerez, which she had inherited from her father Fermin Aranda. The bodega managers cooperated fully, and along with good accounting from her cousin Guillermo Ferguson’s stepson, things went very well and she earned universal respect running the bodega for 50 years till her death in 1997. The wines were bottled and marketed by Emilio Lustau, until the bodega was sold to Alvaro Domecq in 1999.

Pilar Pla Pechovierto “the Sherry Lady” runs the bodega El Maestro Sierra, an all-woman firm along with her daughter Maria del Carmen Borrego Pla and the brilliant enologist Ana Cabestrero Ortega. The bodega began in 1830 when the cooper Jose Antonio Sierra of the Calle Merced filled a bodega with butts which he had made. He died with no heirs and the bodega was inherited by his niece Carmen Casal Soto who, when widowed, set up a company with her children Rosario, Josefa and Antonio to whom she entrusted the production of high quality wines by artisanal means. On Antonio’s death she and her daughters took over the running of the business, and it has prospered ever since. It is now one of the most highly regarded bodegas in Jerez.