Diary of a Shopkeeper, 13th November
People often ask what first got me interested in wine. I can answer in a word: Sherry!
I was visiting a friend in London about 25 years ago, and one evening we went to a Spanish restaurant. I don’t remember anything about the meal, except that at the end when the waiter offered dessert, we said no.
‘Would you like a Pedro Ximenez instead?’ he asked.
Neither of us knew what that was, but being young and adventurous we said yes. I’m very glad we did, or I might not have ended up running a wine shop.
Pedro Ximenez turned out to be something served in a small glass that was dark as treacle and nearly as viscous. It smelled like raisins, prunes, walnuts and a whole box of spices. And when I drank it – wow! – it was sensational. I’d never tasted anything like it before: it reminded me of liquid Christmas pudding.
It was tooth-ticklingly sweet, smooth as silk, and its flavours seemed to last forever in my mouth. Who needs dessert! In an instant, as long as it took to drink a single sip, a new world opened up to me: the world of wine.
My interest in the subject grew from that moment, and I started to taste as many wines as I could and learn as much about them as possible. No matter what I enjoyed over the years, that first Pedro Ximenez (PX to its friends) stuck in my mind as the sweetest, most intense and most delicious drink I’d ever tasted.
I learned that PX is a Sherry produced in an unusual and labour-intensive manner, in just one part of the world, around the town of Jerez de la Frontera in south-west Spain. PX grapes are dried on mats in the blistering sun till most of their liquid evaporates. When they’re finally crushed so the fermentation can start, the juice is thick, concentrated in its flavours, and intensely sweet. At that point it is still several years away from being ready to release, following a lengthy process of fortification and maturation.
The final result is like nothing else you’ll ever drink. Would you want it every day? Probably not. But if you ever fancy the ultimate sweet wine experience this is the bottle to reach for.
It’s so sweet that you can drink it alongside dishes that would overwhelm most wines, for instance desserts like chocolate mousse, warm brownies with cream, or even ice cream. Indeed, you often see suggestions that PX can be poured over vanilla ice cream to produce something like a Sherry-affogato. That is indeed a high-octane treat (similar to having cream AND ice cream with your apple crumble) but I prefer to enjoy PX as I first encountered it: by itself, perfectly able to amaze and delight with no support from any food at all.
One of the most amazing things about PX is that it’s a Sherry, and yet so is Manzanilla. The sweetest wine in the world is made in the same place, by the same people, and in more or less the same way as the driest wine in the world! And inbetween you have a whole range of styles of Sherry, including brisk, salty Fino, fragrant Oloroso, rare and ethereal Palo Cortado, and smooth, luscious Cream. It’s remarkable that this amazingly diverse range of drinks originate in the same cellars with the same winemakers tending them.
The week just ended was International Sherry Week, where this very special wine was celebrated all around the world. A week? Not nearly long enough. Sherry is for life, not just for trifle!
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 16th November 2022. A new one appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.