Sherry: notjust to be trifled with
Frances Bissell is the last person you would expect to find holding court in the Casa del Vino, headquarters of the sherry industry in Jerez.
The Times' cookery writer and contributor to Caterer may have been a guest cook in hotels such as the Mandarin in Hong Kong and the Inter-Continental on Hyde Park Corner, London, but a pillar of the sherry-producing community she is not.
She was cooking a meal for 80 guests and members of the Consejo Regulador, the body which controls the style and quality of sherry. Why sherry? A drink designed for the English market, it is largely thought of as an aperitif, an accompaniment for tapas perhaps and, in classical cuisine, for consommé.
The idea of it as a partner for marrow and Stilton soup, marinated Scotch salmon, roast lamb with onion sauce and caper sauce and roast new potatoes, Cheddar cheese and sherry trifle would have been almost shocking.
But I was reassured by the eager anticipation of the guests and the sight of Mrs Bissell, tranquil and confident, beside the only source of heat to cook with - a portable gas burner upon which rested a large tureen. The Casa del Vino has no kitchen.
Miraculously, with the stalwart help of chefs from the nearby Hotel Jerez, the meal appeared and was received with applause.
It was, it has to be said, experimental. Two styles of sherry were served with each course, and the conversation was technical.
Some might have preferred to see a red wine served with the lamb to show the range of sherries in sharper perspective. But, by the end, the point had been made: sherry is a wonderfully varied and versatile wine. It ranges from sharp and dry through salty and bitter, nutty and faintly aromatic, to concentrated, deeply sweet and raisiny.
Its strength lies in the fresh bitterness and acidity which characterises the finos - including manzanillas, nurtured under a protective layer of yeast called flor, and their evolution into nutty amontillados - or in the concentrated fruit and softer notes found in the olorosos.
Olorosos have never experienced the protection of flor. Instead they have been allowed to oxidise slowly in a cask until they develop, with the help of blending, a harmonious concentration of fruit, without ever losing that backbone of acidity.
One other important factor, the Pedro Ximénez (PX) grape dried in the sun until it develops rich, raisin-like qualities, affects the spectrum of sherry styles. An oloroso made mostly from PX is a rich, dark wine, deeply satisfying at the end of a meal, or with a custardy sweet.
At the Casa del Vino, a fino and a manzanilla (the latter is a fino matured in the seaside town of San Lucar with bitter, slightly salty characteristics) were served with the cream of marrow soup.
The sharp, light wines were a surprise with the well-endowed soup, but there was a pleasing resonance between the tangy Stilton and the overt acidity of the wine. The more restrained fino made a better marriage with the soup, but it was a marriage of contrasts rather than of likenesses.
The salmon had already been marinated in sherry and olive oil and the fino and amontillado presented light, dry and fuller, more concentrated alternatives, respectively. The salmon came with a mint, heather honey and sherry vinegar dressing which clinched it, as far as I was concerned, in favour of the amontillado.
With the roast lamb and sauces of onion, laver (seaweed) and bitter oranges the dry oloroso was preferred to the lighter palo cortado, which starts as a fino, loses its flor and tends towards an oloroso.
The guests' glasses remained noticeably fuller for this course than for the other courses, and although the concentrated flavours of the oloroso matched the meatiness of the dish, you felt that a wine more suited to lengthier sips and with a lower volume of alcohol than sherry was called for.
There was no question of the suitability of the sweet oloroso and cream sherry served with Cheddar and Stilton. How well these wines went together and how enthusiastically the cheese-loving Spanish responded to our cheeses.
The powerfully sweet Pedro Ximénez with the trifle was, in a sense, uncontroversial.
After such a meal I wondered, however, whether the trifle, the most sumptuous of traditional English dishes, itself associated with a rich flavouring of sherry, might not have been better on its own. I would then have been content to nurse the PX on its own through to the end of a truly enlightening evening.
Sherry has the potential to enliven or even to change the dining experience. It tastes different and so does the food which it accompanies.
For the Jerezanos, the event opened up channels of thought about the way they sell their wine. It reminded the British present that our traditional dishes need look only as far as a wine which has been with us for four centuries.
Bearing in mind the enthusiasm of the Spanish government body, the Sherry Institute, for these events, the absence of even a twinkling of interest from Food from Britain seems astonishing. o
