Wine and Sherry Regions of Spain

Spain produces a wide range of wines from fortified sherry to excellent sparklers and very fine reds and whites to everyday quaffing wines. The best quality areas are in the more northerly parts of Spain; Rioja Alta and Alvesa, Ribera del Duero and Pnedes. Here the sun exposure is good but the nights are cooler.

Jerez de la Frontera 

In the province of Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast of south west Spain lies the city of Jerez de la Frontera. Since the late 18th century this has been the unique source of the wine called Sherry. A number of adventurous wine merchants of British and Irish extraction set up business to send the local wines, fortified with extra alcohol, to cooler northern countries. Their names are still there on the labels centuries later although some bodegas have changed their ownership. Croft, Harvey, Sandeman, Gordon, Humbert and Osborne, to name but a few, still offer a variety of sherries of quality made very much in the traditional methods that best suits the wines of this hot and dry corner of Spain.

To many people unfamiliar with the immense cultural diversity that exists in Spain, much of what this country embodies can be found in Andalusia. That, in part, has to do with the fact that much of how Spain exported itself for decades was through typical images associated with this southern region whose roots go back to the earliest days of Phoenician colonization. It comes as no surprise, then, that the wine it produces should come to mind when one thinks of Spain's vinicultural tradition. That tradition can basically be summed up in one word: sherry.

Sherry is greatly indebted to the English who are the ones to have guaranteed its success overseas, but it is not the only drink available. There are also several other regions with age old traditions in the fortified winemaking world, some producing the world's finest sweet wines. But the biggest surprise may yet be to come. Some surprising and exciting enterprises are making leaps into regular still wine, and especially in the red wine sector. Who would have guessed!

Though the English turned it into Spain's ambassador to the wine world, sherry has sometimes had difficulty finding a place for itself in the modern market. its not really a wine the way you or I would normally consider it, but it shouldn't be classified as a liqueur either. What's even more surprising is that, a vast majority of its production (80%) goes abroad, mostly to Great Britain and northern Europe, so don't expect to see many Spaniards ordering very much outside of Andalusia. Still, I highly recommend sherry. The finos and manzanillas are refreshingly dry (and excellent buys) and the others, though often quite a bit pricier, are often extraordinary for their complexity. There is a sherry for every occasion and their class and elegance are undeniable.

Spain's Andalucía spreads across eight provinces, drenched in sun throughout the south of Spain. Millions visit each year, but so few ever stray far from the Costa del Sol. This special portion of the Iberian peninsula, a part of Spain longest occupied by the Moors—the words 'la Frontera' tacked onto many local place names, including that of Jerez, meaning that these towns were on the frontier between Christian and Moorish Spain. In this case Moor is not less.

Andalucía abounds with vines, but they tend to be more in the west than the east. The four Andalucía's wine regions (DO's) are Jerez y Manzanilla, Montilla-Moriles, Málaga and Condado de Huelva, all situated to the west of Granada. The DO's themselves account for over half Andalucía's vineyards.

This is a part of Spain where lunch never starts before mid afternoon, and you may be grateful if you approach dinner by midnight.

Tradition dictates that in Jerez, the tulip-shaped copita glass would contain fino sherry. In Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Manzanilla, in inland Córdoba, it might be a bracing sip of Montilla, and so on.

Despite the powerful heat, this sherry region is well suited to vines. White albariza soil blankets the central growing area— between 60 and 80 per cent chalk, acting as a sponge, storing the winter rainfall until the vines require water in the midsummer

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