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rave the blistering heat of Jerez to cross the city on foot and you will be reminded almost every other street of its most famous export. Sherry fumes waft out from behind the straw curtains of its bodegas and from the many bars and restaurants – each decked out in the colours of famous sherry names.

Travel the city by car and advertisements come at you as you spin round sherry-branded roundabouts and pass enormous billboards and stacks of black casks by the roadside. Arrive by train and you step into an ostentatiously grand station built when the sherry industry brought a wealth to the area notably absent from some parts of Jerez today.

But spend any time in Jerez and it’s obvious that sherry has penetrated far beyond this superficial coating. The industry, and the wealth and people that followed it, has influenced everything – the language, culture, architecture and atmosphere. Juan Martínez Saborido, who promotes wine tourism for the Ayuntamiento de Jerez (the municipal council), says sherry, horses and flamenco have been bound up with the fate of the city for centuries. “Sherry doesn’t affect, but rather floods everything in Jerez. It is part of life here.”

The Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art, one of the city’s other big draws for tourists, was established in 1973 with the help of sherry people and sherry money. The school trains horses and riders, breeds Spanish horses and is world renowned for its showpiece display How the Andalusian Horses Dance. The trainers and riders share the extreme patience and precision of the best sherry makers in preparing and executing a show which sees horses leaping, bucking and prancing in perfect time to almost imperceptible commands. Traditionally many members of winemaking families invested their wealth in horse and bull breeding and many of the city’s bodegas still have their own stud farms and stables.

“Throughout the history of this city there are milestones closely related to the great winemaking families, such as the founding of the Royal Andalusian School of Equestrian Art,” says Saborido. “It is one of Jerez’s major international tourist icons and was born in the heart of the Álvaro Domecq family. To them and to others families such as the Bohorquezes, we owe the development of a flourishing equestrian industry that continues to be one of the pillars, together with winemaking, of the city’s economy.”

“While the horse trainers share sherry’s precision and patience, flamenco shows the city’s passionate side. Performances are melodramatic and rapturous – full of love, loss and death”

Jerez’s other great export is flamenco and statues of its famous singers, dancers and guitarists vie for space on the city’s broad boulevards with the omnipresent black casks. Flamenco was performed in the 18th– and 19th–century ‘tavernas’ and always enjoyed with the local wine. For Saborido they are an “inseparable combination”. “For this city, sherry and flamenco represent a perfect duo,” he says. “Enjoying the best flamenco in a city where some of the best voices and guitar players of the national and international scene have been born should be enjoyed in marriage with sherry.” While the horse trainers share sherry’s precision and patience, flamenco shows the city’s passionate side. Performances are melodramatic and rapturous – full of love, loss and death.

Carmen Aumesquet of the Consejo Regulador (sherry’s regulatory body) says the money from the sherry industry has always made Jerez a more cosmopolitan city than others of a similar size. There is a strong British influence in the architecture with English-style houses, wooden floors and gardens with lawns. The grand mansions of the big winemakers remain, as do British and Irish names like Harvey and Humbert.

Some of the other trappings of a thriving industry were not so permanent. Jerez was one of the first cities in Spain to benefit from a train line when ‘The Sherry Train’ opened in 1854 to carry wineskins to the port of Trocadero and eventually lines ran to individual bodegas. The sherry business peaked during the 1960s by which time it was sustaining glass, paper and cork industries as well as cooperages. Like most of the train lines, these secondary industries have all but disappeared. But sherry still employs many people today, either in its direct production or in the tourist trade which has built up around the industry with bodega tours, sherry golf, sherry cooking classes and a calendar filled with wine-related events like International Sherry Week (2-8 June this year – see www.isherryweek.com for details).

The wine has benefited from the character, geography, history and landscape of Jerez, which provided the perfect people and conditions to develop such a unique product. The soil provides the perfect home to the vines, the yeast carried in the air develops the vital flor, the heat and humidity allows it to thrive, even the winds are in tune, with fresh Atlantic blasts from the coast and hot winds from Africa striking a balance. In turn, the wine has nurtured, protected and shaped the city and its people.

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The origin of its fame

Sherry is exported across the world, and with it, the name of Jerez, thanks to its Denomination of Origin status. Sherry was the first Spanish product to be granted the status (ahead of Rioja), and producers meeting the regulatory requirements and based within the ‘Jerez Superior’ area in the south of the Iberian Peninsula can label their wines ‘Jerez-Xérès-Sherry’ or ‘Manzanilla – Sanlúcar de Barrameda’.

Grapes for these wines can only be grown in vineyards within the defined production zone. The ageing and maturing of the wines must be carried out in the zone known as The Sherry Triangle, incorporating Jerez de la Frontera, El Puerto de Santa María and Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

Around 2,800 wine growers are registered with the regulator with the majority grouped into cooperatives producing the base wine which is then sold on to the 100 registered sherry firms who produce and age sherry and Manzanilla wines.

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