For once, Shakespeare put it fair and square. It is just like that…

‘A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which delivered o’er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is the warming of the blood, which before, cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice; but the sherris warms it, and makes it course from the inwards to the parts’ extremes. It illumineth the face, which as a beacon, gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom’

2 Henry IV, 4.3.85-122.

When you’re in a development team, working all the hours that God gives under the pressures of an imminent release, there are still several sacred moments in the day when you can relax and think of other things. I’ve written about Coffee time at 10.30 AM and Tea time at 3.30PM precisely, but I’ve somehow hesitated before mentioning Sherris-Sack time when the clock strikes 6.00 PM . However, anything that will dry the crudy vapours must be good for anyone who’s feeling overworked (One day, I shall mention the Port break at 9.00 PM for the really overworked dev team)

Shakespeare puts the quote in the mouth of Falstaff, but I can see, in my minds eye, Shakespeare himself taking a break from a long evening’s work with some damned play of his, and sharing a quick glass of Sherris-sack with his friends and ghost-writers Fletcher and Beaumont. Sack was the wine which the poet drank at the  Mermaid Tavern  in Cheapside: the rendezvous of all the dramatists and wits of the Elizabethan era ; and it was Sherris-Sack that he drank at the ” Boar’s Head ” in Eastcheap, on his way to the playhouse on Bankside. (one of his friends, Ben Johnson, preferred Canary Sack). There is nothing like it for reviving the creative juices, and cheering the soul.

Actually, Falstaff couldn’t ever have extolled Sherris Sack because it was unknown in Britain before 1517, when the Duke of Medina Sidonia granted special privileges to English merchants who would come to Jerez, Port St.Mary and Seville to buy the wines of the country. (We pronounce it better than the Spanish: Jerez had been called Sherish in Moorish times)  Before then, the only wines from the region were very sweet, sometimes artificially sweetened, and imported via Spain. The new wines from Jerez de la Frontera in Andalucia, south west Spain were natural wines, not exceptionally dry, but very much drier than hitherto; they were accordingly sold in England as ” seek ” wines, from the Spanish Spanish verb “sacar” (to draw out). This word soon morphed to ‘Sack’. These wines were also exported to the New World, and were undoubtedly the first wines to arrive in America.  Such was their popularity in Britain that Madeira and the Canary Islands, as well as in other parts of Spain, wines of a similar type were shipped to England under the generic name of Sack. Thus it became necessary to distinguish those which came from Jerez ; they first of all went by the name of Jerez  Sack, then Jerez became ” sherris  and ” sherris-sack ” was abbreviated into sherry, or Xeres in France

So, it is ‘Sherry Time!’ that we call when we look up from our screens at six in the evening, and tumble out into the street to find a bar that will serve us the real sherry, the same magic concoction that freed the creative powers of Shakespeare and his circle. Incredibly, that short break is enough to put the spring in the step, ready for another couple of hours work.

There was a time that the British took Sherris Sack very seriously. Even when we were at war with Spain, we carried on drinking Sherry. In 1587, Drake raided Cadiz and brought back 2,900 pipes of Sherry to bolster our dwindling supplies. For the next three hundred years, the miraculous liquid was on every sideboard in a special bottle called a decanter. Samuel Pepys records in 1662 that he mixed sherry and Malaga. He visited the English colony in Sanlucar de Barrameda in 1683. Trade in the miraculous wine was inhibited only in 1702 with the War of the Spanish Succession, where the British were forced to buy the stuff via Portugal, and the Peninsular Wars (1808-14)  where the region became a battleground, occupied for a time by the French, who angered civilized Europe by pillaging  the sherry bodegas and forcing the sherry blenders to flee to the  Cadiz garrison.

During most of he nineteenth century there was much more sherry imported into this country than any other wine; in 1874 there were over six million gallons of sherry imported into England. Nobody ever binged on it, but everybody drank a little sherry, and was the better for it. Unlike most wines, it improved with age and suffered not at all from being served in a decanter or left uncorked. One gless was always sufficient. It was always considered a sign of severe decadence to drink a second glass at a sitting.

What caused Sherry’s demise as the British National Drink? It was, sadly a precipitous drop in standards brought on through a failure to police the ‘Sherry’ label. By the mid-Twentieth century,  most experiences of ‘sherry’ were of a frightful brown liquid like distilled ditch-water mixed with vile cough-medicine and sugar. Much of it came from South Africa. Fortunately, in the 1990s the real sherry trade successfully campaigned to have the name restricted by the European Union to the produce of the Jerez district, (Jerez de la Frontera, Sanlucar de Barrameda, and Puerto de Santa Maria)  and we have seen a return to something close to the previous standards

Real Sherry really does lift the spirits. It gets the brain in gear. You’ve probably never drunk a real Sherry. Everyone to whom I’ve offered  a glass has considered it a life-changing experience.  It is expensive because of the time and care it takes to make it properly;  more  than any other wine. Worse still, its taste and its almost magical powers on the human soul are the result of expert blending, and from being fortified after fermentation with the finest brandy.  The grapes are picked with the greatest care, when perfectly ripe, and they are placed to dry upon straw mats for several hours ; they are then pressed, and the juice or ” must ” is left to ferment at its own will until the month of November which follows the vintage. Then, the expert tasters begin by carefully tasting the contents of each cask and classifying each one according  to the quality or style of wine it is found to contain. Wines made from the same vineyards three months earlier could easily all possess different characteristics by the end of November. This is due chiefly to the way each butt has been affected by the randomness of the fermentation process, and so the expert tasters have to blend them to get the perfect mix.

The three principal classes of fine sherries are the  Fino, or manzanilla,  a delicate wine pale in colour and with delicate, gentle, fragrance ;  the Amontillado,  a heavier wine which requires to be kept longer to mellow, and acquire its distinctive character and fuller flavour, and which derives its name from the town of Montilla ; and the Oloroso’s  fuller, heavier, and darker wine. The famous Vino de Pasto is a wonderful Fino, whereas the seductive Amoroso is  a great Oloroso.

In each of these three main classes of sherries there are many varieties and degrees of excellence. The aim of every shipper, however, is to maintain the style and quality of each type of wine he sells at various prices. This can only be done by the process of blending wines of different years, a system known as “solera’ from the Spanish suelo, ground, taken in the sense of basis or formation. As the new wines slowly ferment in the bodegas, continually losing some of their bulk by evaporation, they are repeatedly refilled with older wines, so that when the time comes for the wine to be shipped, sherry possesses still the fascinating freshness and sweetness of youth, but happily blended with the greater strength of mature years and the charm and softness of old age.

Fortunately, there is no snobbery or mysticism around the purchase of a good collection of Sherry. You just have to buy it from one of the reputable shippers. These are Croft, Domecq, Gonzalez Byass, Harveys of Bristol, and Sandeman.  This is the joy of sherry, you just find one of the reputable merchants and whip out the plastic. Unless you are extremely knowledgeable, steer well clear of bargains

• Karen MacNeil (2001), The Wine Bible (Workman Publishing,), 537: “the world’s most misunderstood and underappreciated wine”.
• Gordon, M Gonzalez  ., Sherry: The Noble Wine (London, 1990).
• Tim Unwin, Wine and the Vine, p.297. Routledge 1991,
• T. Stevenson, ed. The Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia (3rd Edition)
• Jeffs, J., Sherry (4th edn., London, 1992).
• Metcalfe, C., and McWhirter, K., The Wines of Spain and Portugal (London, 1988).
• W. Mey, Sherry (Rhoon, 1988).
• K. MacNeil The Wine Bible pg 447 Workman Publishing 2001
• Read, J., Sherry and the Sherry Bodegas (London, 1988).
• Eric Asimov, “For Overlooked Sherries, Some Respect”, New York Times, 9 July 2008.
• Hugh Johnson  The Story of Wine by, p. 94.