Wine myths
All Sherry is sweet
“Sherry is a sweet dessert wine.”
Most Sherry is bone dry. Fino, Manzanilla, Amontillado, Oloroso and Palo Cortado are all fermented fully dry; the sweet styles are a minority, and most of them are sweetened deliberately after ageing.
The full answer
Sherry is fermented to dryness as a matter of course. Palomino, the principal grape, is low in sugar and the wine is dry before fortification even begins.
The classic styles are dry: Fino and Manzanilla aged under a film of flor yeast; Amontillado, which begins under flor and finishes oxidatively; Oloroso, fortified above the level flor can survive and aged with air; and Palo Cortado in between.
The genuinely sweet wines are made differently. Pedro Ximénez is made from sun-dried grapes and is intensely sweet; Moscatel likewise. Both are separate products, not the default.
The confusion comes from the middle: "Cream" and "Medium" Sherries are dry base wines sweetened for export, and they dominated the British market for so long that they became what the word meant here.
Sweetened Sherry really was the overwhelming majority of what was sold in Britain for most of the twentieth century.
Why the belief persists
A generation of British drinkers met Sherry exclusively as a sweet drink, and that is a hard association to shift.
What producers in a particular place conventionally do. Distinct from a regulated requirement: convention is what happens, regulation is what is compulsory, and confusing the two is one of the commonest errors in regional wine writing.
What would settle it: Documented practice in the region diverging from the stated convention.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Consejo Regulador de las Denominaciones de Origen Jerez-Xérès-Sherry — Consejo Regulador del Jerez
- WSET educational materials and the Systematic Approach to Tasting — Wine & Spirit Education Trust