Sherry guides

Types of sherry

From the crispest driest fino to hedonistically sweet oloroso, there’s a sherry for every palate and every course. Here’s our brief guide to the types of sherry available.

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Fino

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Master of Malt features editor and award-winning drinks author

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Fino

Grapes for fino sherry largely come from chalky soils. As the name suggests, this is made from the finest pressing of the grapes, rather like with the best Champagne, so you are just getting grape juice with no tannin from the skins. Following fermentation, the wine is usually fortified to 15% ABV but the new regulations that came in in 2022 state that it doesn’t need to be fortified if it reaches this percentage naturally. In the past, grapes were left out in the sun in a process known as aseo to concentrate sugars and boost alcohol levels. A layer of yeast grows on the top of fino wine called flor that protects it from oxygen and consumes glycerol, alcohol and any residual sugar in the wine. Finos are aged in a solera and usually bottled with an average age of around five years but some are kept for longer. After about a decade, the flor will die as it has used up all the nutrients in a wine. If the wine continues to age, it will start to oxidise and become an amontillado. As with all sherries, finos have a low acidity but their dryness makes them taste crisp often with green apple and citrus flavours plus almond and yeasty notes.

Manzanilla

This is made in exactly the same way as a fino but it is aged by the sea at Sanlúcar de Barrameda where it seems to pick up a salty tang from the sea rather as some coastal whiskies do. Manzanillas tend to be the crispest, freshest form of sherries and taste particularly good with seafood.

Flor growing on the surface of a fino sherry.

Amontillado

For many sherry fans, a fine amontillado is the pinnacle. It starts life as a fino, ageing under a protective layer of flor but either the flor dies naturally or it’s fortified with brandy to kill it off, and the wine then ages oxidatively. As they age, amontillados start to take on the taste of nuts, orange peel, and sometimes sweeter notes like butterscotch, though the wine contains no sugar. With great age, it begins to take on a salty rasp and an almost ferocious intensity of flavour. Amontillado can be the most challenging style of sherry for people not used to it, in the past such wines were usually sweetened for the British market, but a true amontillado should be dry. The word means ‘in the style of Montilla’ a reference to the neighbouring region to sherry.

In Victorian times, amontillados were the most prized kind of sherry. Dickens was an enormous fan. And, of course, Edgar Allen Poe wrote his chilling story A Cask of Amontillado where a man is lured to his doom with the promise of a fabulous and rare wine. Part of the reason these wines were so prized is that there were many wines masquerading as amontillados that were either adulterated, sweetened or didn’t contain any genuine amontillado at all.

Oloroso

The word oloroso in Spanish means something like pungent, or fragrant depending on who you are talking to. It’s a coarser style, usually made from grapes grown in heavier soils, very different to the delicacy of a fino or elegance of an amontillado. Olorosos are made from pressing wines; in other words, the grapes have been pressed to get the last of the juice out of them so the juice contains tannin from the skin and pips. These impurities mean that the protective flor, the layer of yeast on the top of the sherry, does not usually form but just to make sure, the wine is fortified to about 20% ABV. This means that an oloroso does all its ageing with oxygen contact so it oxidises and turns brown. Almost all olorosos will be aged in a solera. As the brandy is added post-fermentation, olorosos are naturally dry, though you often see sweet olorosos that have been blended with Pedro Ximinez. Sweet or dry, you will find flavours of dried fruit, Brazil nuts, molasses and dark chocolate. In fact, just the sort of flavours you will find in a sherry cask whisky because almost all sherry casks are seasoned with oloroso.

Palo Cortado

Palo Cortado is the rarest type of sherry. It’s usually described as an amontillado with the body of an oloroso. It begins its life as a fino but for some reason the flor dies back or doesn’t form at all and the wine begins to age oxidatively. In the past, when barrels began to do this, they were marked with a cut symbol or in Spanish, a cortado. That’s the story that cellarmen in Jerez or Sanlucar like to tell. Palo Cortados can also be created deliberately. You begin with a delicate palomino grape juice suitable for a fino, then let the wine ferment and age under flor briefly, before adding alcohol to kill the yeasts so that the wine ages with air contact. Eventually you will have a palo cortado. The style runs the gamut from wines that are closer to amontillados in style just with an extra bit of body to ones that are almost oloroso in their pungency.

Pedro Ximénez

Pedro Ximénez, or PX as it’s commonly known, is a type of grape which accumulates sugar to an unusual degree. After picking, the grapes are left out in the sun to partially dry which concentrates the sugar. The result is such a high sugar content that the wine struggles to ferment. When the yeasts have given up, alcohol is added up to about 15% ABV and you are left with a wine with up to about 400 grams per litre of sugar. Mostly PX wines are used to sweeten olorosos to make cream sherries, once the most popular style in Britain. Now, perhaps because they aren’t needed for blending so much, PXs are increasingly bottled on their own. The flavour as you would expect is intensely sweet with the very richest having a consistency like treacle but at the same time with a fresh orange peel note that makes PX surprisingly drinkable. With age, the wines mellow and start to develop savoury flavours of leather, herbs and tobacco. Interestingly, very little PX is grown in the sherry region itself. Most comes from the neighbouring area of Montilla which is famous for its intensely sweet wines which are allowed to be called sherry if matured in Jerez. The region also produces dry wines made from PX but these are not allowed to be labelled a sherry.

Moscatel

This is very rarely seen bottled on its own but this is an intensely sweet wine made like an oloroso but from the moscatel grape. Most is used for blending.

Cream sherry (also known as amoroso)

Sherry in its natural form is usually dry, and that is how it is drunk in Spain. But for export to northern Europe, even the finest wines were usually sweetened. Special blends were created for Britain usually consisting of heavier wines like olorosos beefed up with brandy and sweetened with PX or muscat. These sort of sweet brown boozy sippers are what most people in Britain think of when they hear the word ‘sherry.’ The most famous example is Harvey’s Bristol Cream, once the best-selling sherries in the world, which has given its name to a style, cream sherry - now also known as amoroso. Don’t turn your nose up at such wines, made with good quality well-aged wines, cream sherry can be delicious with flavours of toffee, walnuts and oranges.