The true method by which Spanish sherry is made is fairly complicated, and the interested consumer need pay attention only to its broad lines: Sherry, abroad, is a fortified wine, made generally from Palomino grapes. It is fermented and developed with the aid of a special yeast, known as a flor or “flower,” which is native to the sherry district although nonexistent in most other wine-producing areas; it is aged in 132- gallon barrels, rather than in large tanks or vats, and it is blended and finished in what is known as a solera. This word, certain Californians to the contrary notwithstanding, has no connection with the Spanish sol, or sun. It is defined in most dictionaries as the “mother liquor of wine”; in practice, it means nothing more or less than a pile of barrels.
There can be fifteen butts or fifteen hundred in a solera; they can be arranged in three tiers or four or five, and the wines that they contain can be comparatively young or extremely old. The important and essential facts are these: first, a solera is never empty; second, the young wine goes into the barrels in the top tier while the old wine for bottling is drawn out of the bottom tier; third, each tier save the highest (and youngest) is replenished out of the tier above; fourth, no more than half, and preferably no more than a third, of the wine in the lowest casks is ever drawn off for bottling at one time; fifth, only wines of a predetermined quality and type are used to refill the barrels in the highest tier.
What the solera does, therefore, and does incomparably well, is blend to type. The selected young wines mingling constantly with their elders and betters, ac- quire graces and qualities—in brief, a finish—which they would never acquire by themselves. And it is only through the use of soleras that the great sherry houses are able to ship, year after year, under a given label, an absolutely consistent and unvarying wine.
And now back to California.
A few of the finer California sherries are made from the Palomino grape, which thrives and bears well in the Great Central Valley; most of the cheaper ones, unfortunately, are made from the Thompson Seedless.
Flor yeast, brought over from Spain and made available by the University of California, is used in sherry-making by perhaps a dozen producers in all, and by most of them on an experimental scale. The results are quite surprising, and the best West Coast Flor sherries are astonishingly similar in character and flavor to the light, dry Finos, Montillas, and Amontillados of Spain. Once they can legally be shipped at 18 per cent, rather than at 19 ½ per cent alcohol, they will be even closer to their Spanish prototypes. But only a fraction—alas!—of California sherry is so made or will be so made in the next five or ten years. The commercial sherries produced in this country are “cooked” or “baked”—heated, that is to say, to somewhere between 120 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit and held at this temperature for a period of several weeks. Their sherry flavor is really the taste of oxidized and caramelized white wine; the result can be fairly good, but it is certainly no very close approximation of what is known as sherry in Spain.
This cooking or baking process is not infrequently employed abroad. It plays a major role, although with a good many refinements, in the production of most Madeira, most Marsala, and some Malaga. But it has no connection with the making of sherry, except possibly of certain very heavy, sweet brown sherries which are no great credit to their name. The cooked taste of a mediocre California sherry is easy to recognize; it is the unmistakable hallmark of a poor wine.
Perhaps more than any other wines, sherries and their brothers and cousins improve when stored in oak. The unpleasant woody taste of a claret or Burgundy long in barrel becomes altogether agreeable and quite different in a sherry similarly kept, and without such aging no sherry ever acquires much in the way of finesse or balance. Small oak casks, unfortunately, are the exception rather than the rule in wineries in the Sweet Wine Country; most young wines are stored and educated, so to speak, in concrete or redwood; and really advanced institutions, such as soleras, are almost unknown. It has nevertheless been demonstrated that California wines gain as much through solera blending as the most lordly Amontillados of Spain. Ten years from now, it is quite possible that we shall have soleras in every Valley winery; such is certainly not the case, by a long, long way, today.
Meanwhile, the thing to look for in California sherries is progress in this general direction: the word Palomino on a front or back label, an indication that flor yeast has been used, that the wine has been stored in small oak barrels, or finished and blended by the solera system. These, basically, are the steps toward what can and will eventually be a distinguished aperitif wine made in this country.
Year in and year out, more port than sherry is produced in California. Only the worst of it is as bad as bad California sherry, but even the best of it is nowhere near so close to its European counterpart as is good Flor sherry. Port, in Portugal, is made from grapes grown in steep, picturesque vineyards in the Douro Valley, almost all of them planted to one of four or five or six varieties of grape. No California port, produced in commercial quantities, is made from any one of these grapes. Instead, we get port made out of almost every variety of grape used for table wine (Zinfandel, Carignane, Grenache, Petit Sirah), out of grapes which have no virtue except the color they can impart to a wine too pale (Salvador, Alicante Bouschet), and out of grapes which have no attraction except the fact that they are cheap.
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