It is supposed to be a red wine week and so Pedro Ximinez, the grape used to create this week's wine, doesn't really qualify. However, I am prepared to make this exception for two reasons. Firstly, whilst the grape itself is a pale, yellowy-green colour the wine is a rich, dark, mahogany brown and a long way from white. Secondly, the rules are mine and should not be allowed to constrain my exploration. More about a particular constraint later.
Since escaping the responsibilities associated with bluffing my way through the world of IT, I have very much enjoyed becoming a volunteer in a community shop in my home village. Apart from the great pleasure derived from doing something that feels genuinely useful and is motivated by something other than financial gain for the first time in many years, I have also made a number of new friends and acquaintances, with a wide variety of background and experiences. The shop itself sells an impressive range of essential items including a number of wines supplied by Liberty Wines. One of these is:
Week X (2019) El Candado, Pedro Ximinez Sherry. Wigginton Community Shop £22.
This is a unique drink and very distinct from anything you might associate with the word 'Sherry'. If you don't like Sherry, try this as it may surprise you.
It is Sherry, however, as it is made in the traditional Sherry way, with the wine having been matured in a solera system, after it has been fortified with grape spirit. This is where new wine is added to the barrels at the top of a stack and each year part of the contents are drawn off and added to a barrel in the next layer down in that stack until, after a few years, it has reached the bottom of the stack. Once there it can be drawn off and bottled. The liquid that goes into the bottle will be at least as old in years as the number of levels in the solera and, because the barrels are never more than one-third emptied and topped up in any one year, mostly much older. This process in known as 'fractional blending' as only a fraction of the wine from any one harvest is used at a single time and the blend is created in the solera from the juice of all the years that have ever been added to it. This wine has an average age of ten years as a consequence. (Make sense? No? OK try Wikipedia, or a proper book. Perhaps go on a course?)
Pedro Ximinez, or PX for ease, is extremely sweet. This version has 400 grams of sugar in every litre of wine. Is that a lot? Yes, as a typical dry table wine will have about 1% of that amount. In fact, this is so sweet that if it is drunk without being chilled first or, as is suggested on the bottle, being taken 'on the rocks' it can be too syrupy to be experienced at its best. It is full of figs, raisins, chocolate and even coffee and spice. Ideally, this should be drunk with friends although it won't mind being kept in the fridge for quite a long time which is just as well, given that you want to keep your teeth.
Poured over vanilla ice-cream it makes a great, simple dessert and it can stand up to a good, salty blue cheese when its sweetness and dried-fruity flavours make a great combination.
The bodega from which this comes is Valdespino, named after Alfonso Veldespino a 13th century knight who fought alongside King Alfonso X against the invading Arabs. I can't find any reference to him making Sherry which may not have come along until a couple of hundred years later, but the family who own the lands Alfonso was given in return for his loyalty, the Estevez family, produce a good volume of different styles of Sherry from 750 hectares of their own vineyards and if the others are as good as this, then I really must try some of them.
The keen-eyed amongst you will have noticed that there is a padlock attached to the top of the bottle. That's not me being overly cautious but the producer's attempt to tell you this is worthy of a bit of pilfering. El Candado translates from the Spanish as ' the lock' and, I think, hints at the close control the winemaker has on the quality of his product.
Since escaping the responsibilities associated with bluffing my way through the world of IT, I have very much enjoyed becoming a volunteer in a community shop in my home village. Apart from the great pleasure derived from doing something that feels genuinely useful and is motivated by something other than financial gain for the first time in many years, I have also made a number of new friends and acquaintances, with a wide variety of background and experiences. The shop itself sells an impressive range of essential items including a number of wines supplied by Liberty Wines. One of these is:
Week X (2019) El Candado, Pedro Ximinez Sherry. Wigginton Community Shop £22.This is a unique drink and very distinct from anything you might associate with the word 'Sherry'. If you don't like Sherry, try this as it may surprise you.
It is Sherry, however, as it is made in the traditional Sherry way, with the wine having been matured in a solera system, after it has been fortified with grape spirit. This is where new wine is added to the barrels at the top of a stack and each year part of the contents are drawn off and added to a barrel in the next layer down in that stack until, after a few years, it has reached the bottom of the stack. Once there it can be drawn off and bottled. The liquid that goes into the bottle will be at least as old in years as the number of levels in the solera and, because the barrels are never more than one-third emptied and topped up in any one year, mostly much older. This process in known as 'fractional blending' as only a fraction of the wine from any one harvest is used at a single time and the blend is created in the solera from the juice of all the years that have ever been added to it. This wine has an average age of ten years as a consequence. (Make sense? No? OK try Wikipedia, or a proper book. Perhaps go on a course?)
Pedro Ximinez, or PX for ease, is extremely sweet. This version has 400 grams of sugar in every litre of wine. Is that a lot? Yes, as a typical dry table wine will have about 1% of that amount. In fact, this is so sweet that if it is drunk without being chilled first or, as is suggested on the bottle, being taken 'on the rocks' it can be too syrupy to be experienced at its best. It is full of figs, raisins, chocolate and even coffee and spice. Ideally, this should be drunk with friends although it won't mind being kept in the fridge for quite a long time which is just as well, given that you want to keep your teeth.
Poured over vanilla ice-cream it makes a great, simple dessert and it can stand up to a good, salty blue cheese when its sweetness and dried-fruity flavours make a great combination.
The bodega from which this comes is Valdespino, named after Alfonso Veldespino a 13th century knight who fought alongside King Alfonso X against the invading Arabs. I can't find any reference to him making Sherry which may not have come along until a couple of hundred years later, but the family who own the lands Alfonso was given in return for his loyalty, the Estevez family, produce a good volume of different styles of Sherry from 750 hectares of their own vineyards and if the others are as good as this, then I really must try some of them.
The keen-eyed amongst you will have noticed that there is a padlock attached to the top of the bottle. That's not me being overly cautious but the producer's attempt to tell you this is worthy of a bit of pilfering. El Candado translates from the Spanish as ' the lock' and, I think, hints at the close control the winemaker has on the quality of his product.
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