Tío Pepe en Rama 2022 release, Spain NV (from £16.50, thewinesociety.com; ocado.com; leaandsandeman.co.uk; tanners-wines.co.uk) Most wines don’t follow a particularly strict release schedule. It’s generally a matter of when the wine feels ready to go, which varies greatly according to the producer, the region, and the style they’re looking to make. But there are a few brands and styles that are very much seasonal releases. The most famous of these is without question beaujolais nouveau, which “arrives” as the old ad slogan has it, on the third Thursday of November each year. Over the past decade or so, however, wine lovers have come to anticipate another seasonal release round about now: en rama sherry. These are dry fino and manzanilla styles that are bottled directly from the barrel, unfiltered and unclarified, in the spring. The idea is that the wines have an extra level of flavour, freshness and depth at this time of the year, an assertion that certainly feels true about the magnifiencent 2022 release from Tío Pepe, a concentrated essence of salty-sourdough-savouriness.
Bodegas Hidalgo Manzanilla Pasada Pastrana, Spain NV (£12.99, Waitrose) The key to the intensity of springtime-bottled en rama sherry can be found in a yeasty production quirk known as flor that marks out all fino and manzanilla sherry, en rama or otherwise. Put simply, flor is a thick layer of yeast that forms over the surface of sherry as it ages in barrel. The flor protects the sherry from oxygen, and gives fino and manzanilla sherries their distinctive Marmitey tones – flavours that are very different to those found in oloroso or the super-sweet pedro ximénez styles where the layer of flor doesn’t form. According to Tío Pepe, the 2022 release was drawn from 96 barrels at a moment – 23 March to be precise – when the flor is at its thickest, “imbuing” this sherry, as they say rather poetically, “with a wonderful salinity and bloom”. Depth, intensity and complexity in dry sherry isn’t all about bottling times, however. Bodegas Hidalgo’s superb single-vineyard manzanilla’s glorious intensity has as much to do with an extended ageing (12 years) in cask before release.
Domaine Macle Côtes du Jura Tradition, Jura, France 2016 (from £45, shrinetothevine.co.uk; vinetrail.co.uk) The sherry bodegas of Jerez and nearby estuarine Sanlúcar de Barremeda (home of manzanilla) are by far the most famous exponents of flor-influenced winemaking, where the yeasty-layer brings a satisfying salty-savoury twang to even the cheapest, lightest styles, such as the briskly thirst-quenching Morrisons Fino Sherry (£5.25). But southern Spain isn’t the only place where flor flourishes. In recent years, adventurous winemakers all over the world have been inspired to cultivate their own flor, and I’ve tried successful (unfortified) examples from Chile, Argentina, California and Australia. But the place with the longest and most intriguing history of flor wine outside Andalucía is the rural eastern French region of the Jura, where vines are interspersed with pastureland for the cows that produce Comté cheese. Domaine Macle makes some of the most refined examples I’ve come across, with the dry white Tradition an elaborately complex, nutty, unfortified dry white wine that has aged for three years under the veil of yeast.
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