Tim James: Getting geeky again, with great sherry

I’m certainly not the wine-geek I once was. More and more I care less and less about such things as pH, time spent on skins this vintage compared with last, the direction of the rows of vines, the precise age and size of barrels, and the like. Possibly it’s to do with increased difficulty in remembering the stuff I once knew (even about last year’s time on skins), but somehow I just don’t find the fine details and explanations as memorable, let alone fascinating, as I once did. I don’t regard this as cause for either self-congratulation or self-castigation. But it does make for a less complicated relationship with wine – and, anyway, my interest has expanded from the liquid itself to the culture and history, landscape and people, that produce the stuff.

Then along comes sherry. And I get sucked in again. In fact, sherry could well illustrate an earlier geekiness and subsequent forgetting. I used to know a lot about sherry – read the books, twice visited Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia and had amazing tours of bodegas with experts, did some extraordinary tastings (I do actually recall one of them, in the Alcázar of Jerez, of old great amontillados that counts as one of the great aesthetic – dare I say?– experiences of a lifetime). Sherry is surely just about the most complicated thing in the whole of wine, I think, and much of the subtle detail about all the permutations has now grown fuzzy in what passes for my mind.

Recently, I organised a tasting for my group around the products of the Bodegas Tio Pepe, so I had to brush up. It was a fascinating tasting, starting with the standard big-volume (but highly respected) Tio Pepe Fino, matured by fractional blending in a solera – matured with that famous layer of yeast (“flor”) protecting the wine from oxidation but working various magical things upon the very lightly fortified wine. That has an average age of four years (some components of the solera necessarily younger, some older). Then we followed developments of that exact same basic wine. Firstly through an “En Rama” version that’s only very lightly filtered and stabilised. After that it was a question of age, in the “Palmas” series of annual barrel selections of Tio Pepe wines with average ages of six, eight and ten years, showing increasingly greater complexity and intensity.

Already after four years, the layer of yeast starts to thin out, as the nutrients it feeds on are consumed and unreplenished by very young wine. Once a fino gets to about ten years, the layer of yeast covering the wine in its two-thirds-filled barrel has become decidedly thin and patchy. The wine is now starting to age substantially through oxidation, and that character is very noticeably adding to the flor character.

Any remaining flor is now defeated by a light fortification. From this point onwards, the wine ages only oxidatively and is called amontillado. We tasted two excellent old amontillados – both originating as finos in the Tio Pepe solera. Del Duque is the regular rare old amontillado label of Gonzalez Byass, owners of Tio Pepe, the wine having an average of 30 years spent in old American oak casks. The other was another selection in the Palmas series. The single cask from which the Cuatro Palmas was taken in 2024 had an average age of 55 years. Some of the wine blended in it would have been in its 70s (like a few of the tasters in my group). The wine is extraordinary, like Del Duque but a little more so, much darker than the other wines, pungent, hugely concentrated and complex. Admittedly, I suppose, these old amontillados are an acquired taste, but my word, it’s one worth acquiring.

To anyone whose eyes haven’t glazed over by this time, I will say something about my revived geekiness. Galvanised by the idea of presenting a sherry tasting I consulted books and googled like a proper geek. I managed to get hold of the technical information about the wines (the Bodegas Tio Pepe website is very good, but didn’t have details of the latest release of the Palmas wines, so Michael Fridjhon of importer Reciprocal kindly chased them).

But, looking as a revived geek at the specifications of the amontillados, I was astounded by some of the numbers. That Cuatro Palmas (2024 release) has an alcohol of 21.5%, compared to the original Tio Pepe’s 15.5%. That’s the result of all those decades of evaporation, and not surprising to me. But I also saw that the residual sugar had increased from less than 1 g/L to 7 g/L, and that did surprise me. Could concentration have done that? Could the wine have been sweetened a little at the end? But amontillado these days is not allowed to be sweetened (usually), and Gonzalez Byass say that these Palmas wines are bottled without any manipulation beyond a very coarse filtering. I couldn’t find any explanation in my sherry books or online (though I didn’t venture into some of the very technical academic papers about sherry).

Fortunately, I managed to consult the great sherry expert (and owner of Equipos Navajos, perhaps the most esteemed bottler of a range of sherries these days), Jesús Barquín, whom I’d met in my visits to sherry (we bonded a little over the strength of our shared contempt for the claims of biodynamics, incidentally). He explained to me that sugars do not dissipate at all as wine ages oxidatively, as with total acidity. With the great age of these amontillados, such sugar levels are entirely possible. “There has to be a correlation between these two magnitudes (sugar and acidity) so as to discard any suspicion of forbidden manipulation.” And lo and behold, I was able to check the total acidity of the Cuatro Palmas, and it too had increased hugely. Acetaldehydes had gone down, glycerol gone up, in case you wondered.

Geekish question answered. I’d forgotten how much happens with sherry and how intricate it is. To look at the standard Tio Pepe and see what one or three or five decades – together with a lot of careful nurturing – can do to it is to see one of the great marvels of wine. (Though not widely enough appreciated these days: a bottle of a great old amontillado, or oloroso or palo cortado, costs less than a fairly modest international pinot or cabernet, often much less. But of course, you don’t need the numbers, or an understanding of the processes, to marvel at the taste. It does help me more to think of those dim cathedral-like bodegas in hot Jerez, with endless rows of dark old barrels of wine being guided and cared for so carefully by custodians helping nature on one of its most rewarding and interesting collaborations with us.

Gonzalez-Byass sherries are imported to South Africa and available from Reciprocal, the Palmas range in very small numbers.

• Tim James is one of South Africa’s leading wine commentators, contributing to various local and international wine publications. His book Wines of South Africa – Tradition and Revolution appeared in 2013.