Flor and fauna
The front-page photograph of the Diario de Jerez doesn't bode well for our sherry and food matching mission: two fish-sellers in Jerez market sitting forlornly on the empty marble tops of their stalls.
The fuel crisis has reached the south of Spain. Some supplies are getting through - about a third of the fish market is operational, if rather limited in its selection. The famous local crustacea are particularly thin on the ground. Never mind. There'll be plenty more other ingredients available to match up with sherry, assures our guide, Bartolo Vergara of the Sherry Assocation.
Sherry, you see, isn't just about tapas. Many of us know about the pleasures of washing down a tapa of freshly cooked prawns with a chilled glass of fino; or swallowing an oyster with a manzanilla chaser. But does it have a place at the dinner table - during dinner, that is, not just as an aperitif or digestif? Does it have more than an occasional place in the kitchen as an ingredient? Is there life beyond a glass of cream sherry and a slice of fruit cake à la Great Aunt Mabel? Yes, yes and yes, is the answer. And just to prove it, we brought along a chef - Barny Haughton of Quartier Vert in Bristol.
Haughton has been dabbling with sherry since he opened his Spanish-inspired Bristol restaurant back in 1988. The former English teacher turned chef serves up tapas alongside his other Mediterranean-inspired dishes and sells a fair amount of the drier styles of sherry. He's a great fan of the drink but still finds it a hard sell. He wanted inspiration. Cue Jerez.
Jerez, of course, is the home of sherry. They drink gallons of it here, though chiefly manzanilla. On a balmy summer's evening, it's glugged back with as much enthusiasm as a bottle of wine - and at an average 15% abv it's only a smidgen higher in alcohol than many wines and the same alcohol as an increasing number of big, blowsy numbers from the New World - a trend that the sherry bodegas are watching with great interest. "During a feria [festival] we drink two bottles a day each, easily," declares sherry producer Don Gabriel Gonz lez. "That's a big difference from the average one or two glasses of sherry you drink in the UK. We've still got some huge cultural obstacles to overcome if we want you to drink more."
Favourite pairing
Sherry is drunk throughout a meal in Jerez. A favourite pairing is with seafood - served plain and simple or deep-fried - great piles of it, fresh from the surrounding rivers and sea. It goes extraordinarily well. The sharp, salty tang of manzanilla, for example, complements the succulent fish perfectly, bringing out the sweetness of the meat and refreshing the palate for the next mouthful.
The richer styles of sherry, such as amontillado and oloroso, are glugged with hearty stews, pan-fried offal and roasted meats.
It works, up to a point, but it's hardly everyday drinking, and needs copious amounts of iced water to slake the thirst. In most cases, a glass of red is a far better match. Best to focus on sherry with the first course and dessert.
Sherry is most famously drunk as an aperitif. Manzanilla, the biggest-selling category, is accompanied by plate after tiny plate of tapas, from fresh, creamy almonds to tangy olives, salty mojama (air-dried tuna) and vinegar-drenched anchovies - it copes with a gamut of flavours. In the winter months manzanilla drinkers switch to dry oloroso.
Sherry is used copiously in the kitchen. Reduced with a little sherry vinegar, Pedro Ximénez (PX) made a surprisingly well-matched combination with seared scallops at La Mesa Redonda. Chef José Antonio Valdespino also successfully adds a slug of amontillado to his sweetbreads, which brings out the nuttiness a treat. While oloroso adds a toasty edge to game, manzanilla brings "a bit of character" to clams - says Valdespino - and amontillado adds a whole new dimension to braised globe artichokes and to an almond sauce that accompanied pork braised in milk and lemon rind, as we found out.
In short, sherry has many possibilities. "It's a lot more versatile than I thought," enthuses Haughton.
Best food and sherry matches
Gonz lez Byass, the biggest sherry brand in Spain, was right to swear by tortilla de camerones and its fino, Tio Pepe. A flour and water batter is jazzed up by a little sweet paprika; softened chopped onion, parsley and tiny shrimps are added - the shrimps go into the batter alive: "They jump around a bit but they don't come out properly if they aren't alive," stresses bodega chef, Imaculada Terry - then deep-fried and eaten hot.
Sea bass baked in salt, washed down with a glass (or bottle) of chilled La Guita manzanilla, was Haughton's top match, at Bigote, in Sanl£car de Barrameda.
Bigote - Spanish for moustache (the proprietor has a notable one) - started humbly as a fishermen's tavern. There's no menu, they just tell you what's fresh from the Bay of C diz. The salt keeps the fish super-moist and the manzanilla brings out the fresh-from-the-sea taste. Another Bigote special, ortiguillas - sea anemones deep-fried in batter, which taste like creamed spinach - also partnered the La Guita perfectly.
On the pudding front, our top match went to torcino de cielo (an egg yolk-rich pudding, which rather unappetisingly translates as "lard of the sky") and Harvey's Rich Old Oloroso - but a cräme brñlée could be a good substitute.
Ever tried PX and chocolate? The sun-dried grapes produce the finest, most concentrated sweet sherries that show off with chocolate - not the high-cocoa-content, bitter kind, but sweeter, milkier chocolate. We tried it with a mousse cake: the sugar in the cake is cancelled out by the scarily high sugar content (some 500g per litre) of the PX.
And move over, port and Stilton - oloroso and Stilton could be the next big thing.
Harvey's is currently shouting about the pairing of blue cheese with its Rich Old Oloroso. The one it presented was a tad too strong - it overwhelmed the fruit completely - but a milder, creamier blue would have worked a treat, or a crumbly blue such as Stilton. n
