MANZANILLA

After years of falling sales, one of the ways in which the sherry trade has managed to reinvent itself is by reaching back to a less industrialised past, hence the trend for the style known as En Rama, which is effectively sherry’s answer to unpasteurised cheese, being much less heavily filtered than standard commercial sherry. The idea is that the bottled wine tastes as close to that in the producer’s cask as possible – more textured, more intensely flavoured – and should be drunk up relatively soon (a matter of months) after release. Two of the best this year come from two of the biggest sherry names: the fabulously complex yeast, nuts and tang of Gonzalez Byass Fino En Rama and the saline-spicy punch of Hidalgo’s La Gitana En Rama. David Williams, The Observer (Jul 2018)