foreword
Foreword
To someone who has never been far from a glass of sherry for most of his life (ie, 60 years or so), it is a mystery why not everyone shares my love for it. Hardly anyone, indeed, over many years. How long can anything so enjoyable be out of fashion before the tide turns, I sometimes wonder? And why is it turning now, as it undoubtedly is? I can easily account for its growing status as a ‘new-found’ speciality: a wine that doesn’t fit into any cosy category, but brings a taste and character of its own. We live in an age hungry for new experiences. You have to have faith that something so old can be new, but happily every generation comes wide-eyed to the best things in life. Then why the two-generation break in appreciating a good thing? I’m afraid it’s because much of it wasn’t all that good. An easy market is an open goal for mediocrity, and – though I blush to say it – mediocrity can sell well in this country. To adapt H L Mencken: ‘No one ever lost money underestimating the taste of the British public.’ And there were wine merchants who tested the theory to death: the near-death of sherry. What can be one of the world’s greatest wines was blended into a sweetish brownness that famously sat on sideboards from one Christmas to another. During this time the wine world grew more and more competitive; new arrivals on the scene, above all from the New World, were pretty strong, tended to be sweet (think of Australian Chardonnay in its all-conquering period) and had the lustre (or rather the glitter) of novelty. Sherry was simply old hat. Very few even knew of the existence of the dry, much lighter sherries that are now in vogue. Fino was very much a minority taste, however much it would have suited novelty-seekers buying Chardonnay. It has one brake on its success-rate, though: it is dry without compromise, and British drinkers are not the only ones who say dry and actually mean rather sweet. Cynically, perhaps, I would add another impediment to sherry’s progress: it is too cheap. Wine buyers can be hard to persuade that something at half the price can, in
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some cases, be twice as good – as, for example, most popular white wines widely used as aperitifs. You cannot discuss sherry without discussing the elephant in the room: sugar. Even today the majority of sherry exported is sweet, much of it categorized as ‘cream’. Sweet wines form a category of their own, ignored by commentators and opinion-formers.The cognoscenti simply don’t expect their peers to be interested, so they turn to other things. Then what about port? In Victorian times there was a battle royal between port and sherry, both of them strong and sweet. At one time it seemed that sherry was the winner. Many factors tipped the balance, including the discovery that the royal cellars had over-ordered sherry for decades to a ludicrous amount. When they sold hundreds of dozens in a rush it hurt both the trade and the market. Phylloxera devastated the sherry vineyards, as it eventually did vineyards round the world. And sherry turned out to be a ‘style’ of wine that other hot countries could imitate. Australia, South Africa and Cyprus crowded into the market with wines often up to the standard of cheaper sherries. It was a highly competitive market, dominated by too few brands. And into this market stepped a fraudster on an epic scale. I’ll leave Ben Howkins to tell the story… Ben is an old friend of mine and a wine merchant of the old school, tirelessly dedicated to showing the world how interesting, even beautiful, and what fun wine can be. Sweet wines are his special love. For years he was a star port salesman. Then he launched the most successful Tokaji company of all time (the one, I’m happy to say, that I co-founded after the 1989 Revolution); now he’s shining his light on sherry. Don’t expect a routine sales pitch.To give you the idea, one of his port books is called Real Men Drink Port. The real sherry story, crooks included, is not straightforward. A multitude of bright, and some brilliant, people have been involved. Their different interpretations make sherry a wonderful field to explore, and yet a very easy one to enjoy, coming from a part of the world celebrated for its beauty, its climate, its dancing and horsemanship and general joie de vivre. And yet sherry remains what to me is an absurd bargain. For one bottle of a fine white burgundy I can buy six of Spain’s greatest white wine. Read on, glass in hand.
HUGH JOHNSON OBE
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