We don’t have much room to store cases of wine, so rather than offering people the same old list of Syrahs, Cabernets, Chardonnays, Pinot Grigios and all the rest of the usual suspects we thought we’d make up a wine list of the strangest and most unusual wines we could find, sort of like a wine zoo for exotic animals.

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Dessert wine is not my thing, and when I think about sherry I think about truly terrible, over-sweetened wine that’s enjoyed exclusively by little old ladies or by British housewives in the 1960′s taking nips out of the cooking sherry just to make their lives pass by a little easier when no one was looking. Just thinking about sherry is enough to make my tongue curl and turn back on itself. Then I found out that most of what was sold as “sherry” was British Sherry or California Sherry or Irish Sherry, but not Spanish sherry (which is supposed to be the “real” sherry) and then I tasted this Solera 1847 from Gonzalez Byass, and now I keep a bottle in the kitchen, underneath the counter, and I take nips from it all night long, just to make like go by a little easier when no one is looking.

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But this Solera 1847 changed all of that for me. This is sherry as an intense, old world experience. After putting it on the menu I don’t think I can ever go back to serving anything else.

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Like champagne, sherry (the word is a corruption of the name of the town where it’s manufactured in Spain, Jerez, which was first named Sherish by the Moors and then later Xeres and then, finally, Jerez, and now sherry) can only be manufactured in the “Sherry Triangle” between Jerez, Sanlucar de Barrameda and El Puerto de Santa Maria. But until the EU put a law into place establishing a Spanish DOC for sherry production, the world was full of exported and local sherries of various (and often lousy) quality. The Irish had sherry, the Brits had sherry and there was even sherry made in California and almost all of it was overwhelmingly sweet. It was a drink for people who don’t like alcohol, like the Coca Cola of wine. Spanish sherry is usually dry, but it also comes in many varieties and what I’m serving at Dirt Candy is oloroso sherry.

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Oloroso is aged sherry that mellows over the years, taking on a dark color and a nutty flavor as it sits in its cask and chills out. Casks used to age oloroso sherry are often sent to Scotland afterwards, where they’re used to age whiskey and if you want an idea of what oloroso sherry tastes like while you’re reading this blog post, imagine a smoother, rounder single malt whiskey trickling over your tongue like an amber creek way out in the Scottish highlands. I’m serving Solera 1847 from Gonzalez Byass, which is one of the oldest sherry makers in Spain – one of its founders built the first grass tennis court in Spain! Sherry and tennis, the perfect combination.

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A 1940′s bottle of Solera 1847 Oloroso Dulce.

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The awesome back of the bottle. Read the review

of this bottle over here.

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The Solera 1847 goes down like mother’s milk – smooth and delicious with no burn and no toothache-inducing sweetness. It’s got the smell of caramel and the flavor of toasted butter. It’s the opposite of what you’d expect from a sherry, all rich dark flavors and no alcohol burn, and it’s the kind of wine that gives dessert wines a good name. Just as the Les Graviers Chardonnay I serve delivers the essence of Chardonnay without any oakiness, the Solera 1847 gives you the true taste of sherry without the sugary sweetness you’ve come to expect due to all the bad sherries out there trying to lead you astray.

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