Saturday, April 23, 2011

WWW.Sherry.Org

Sat April 23, 2011

I have spent a wonderful time this morning on the informational website www.sherry.org. This website is a must for students taking the Unit 6 Fortified Wines exam. It covers all the factors of history, viticulture, production, classification, ageing and bottling. It also goes into great detail about each of the wine styles produced.

I found the site to be very honest in its descriptions of wines and processes. Not loaded with a lot of marketing, but just delivering straight forward facts, detailed but with good summaries if you are not interested in the low level information. This web site fills out the topics in Robinson's Oxford Companion in a very readable way. it also is more up-to-date and includes topics that aren't mentioned in the text. For example - it classifies the wines as Generosos (Dry, ), Generosos Liqueur (Generosos sweetened with RCGM), Manzanillas, Naturally Sweets (PX and Moscatel), and Special Categories (VOS, VORS, etc). This brings an entirely different level of understanding to the topic of Sherries.

Another understanding that I got here that I must have glossed over in the text is that unlike most Sherries that are fortified after fermentation (isn't that sort of how we learn the definition of Sherry ?) both PX and Moscatel are sun-dried ("sunned") to raisin them and then fortified during fermentation like a port to retain some of the original sweetness.

They also have a great map showing the 9 (!) cities where Sherry can be produced and are specific about the 3 cities where it can be aged. There is even a great section describing the aging lodges/bogedas and how their form follows function, they were built to balance the aspects of the climate and the needs of the wines.

I love JR's Oxford Companion but if there were several more websites like this, studying for the Units 6 test would be a breeze. i highly recommend it.

john

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