Once upon a time, sherry was the glittering jewel in the crown of Spanish wine. A delicacy coveted by the tables of kings and emperors across Europe. Fast-forward to today and most people are less likely to see sherry as a high-quality, artisan product than a handy ingredient for a once-a-year Christmas trifle, or a boozy fruitcake. Even those who know more than most about wine often don’t know all that much about sherry, which is frequently viewed with ambivalence and/or bafflement. 

Yet there has been a quiet revolution stirring in Andalucía. Its aim: to blow the image of cheap, sweet sherry out of the water and reinstate this regal wine where it belongs, at the head of the table of the world’s finest drinks. How will it do this? By reintroducing the world to ‘real’ sherry. Wild sherry. Sherry that is untamed and unpredictable.

‘Wild sherry’ might seem something of an oxymoron, but that says more about how we’ve come to consume it than the drink itself. Sherry was always supposed to be a complex drink, not only thanks to a unique production method in the solera system and the vast range of different styles it comes in, but because the nuances of the wine vary even from cask to cask. However, much of the sherry that has often been exported has catered to the (low) expectations of foreign, and particularly British, consumers – think cheap, simple and sweet. Diabetes in a glass. Even higher quality, well respected and very drinkable sherries are usually tinkered with, heavily filtered, stabilised and blended to produce a wine that, while very drinkable, is, above all, predictable. Nothing too scary that may frighten the consumer.

“Sherry was always supposed to be a complex drink, not only thanks to a unique production method in the solera system and the vast range of different styles it comes in, but because the nuances of the wine vary even from cask to cask.”

That, at least, is the view of Jesús Barquín, Professor of Criminology at the University of Granada, sherry connoisseur and a founding member of Equipo Navazos, a modest but increasingly influential venture which is aiming to reintroduce the world to “authentic” sherries – sherries taken pretty much straight from the cask, with minimal filtration and no stabilisation. Instead of hiding their quirks and idiosyncrasies, these wines flaunt them shamelessly.

The results are unlike any sherry the wine world has seen for a long time. Writing in Decanter, the wine writer Maggie Rosen described one offering, La Bota de Manzanilla Pasada no. 20, as “wild and extreme: more in common with single malt Scotch than with wine”. Another writer, Jamie Goode, described Equipo Navazos sherries a little excitedly as “mind-blowing” and “a life-enhancing experience” (www.wineanorak.com). And they throw up some interesting flavours that inspire wild and exotic fantasies. One writer has described La Bota de Manzanilla Pasada no. 30 as having notes of curry and spices; another (Maz Allen in Gourmet Traveller) describes the ‘I Think’ Manzanilla En Rama as “like licking oyster shells in rolling surf”.

These sherries, Barquín argues, represent “the true expression of the grape, soil and tradition of wine making in Andalucía”, a tradition of wine confident enough in its own qualities to not have to bend to the demands of fickle market preferences. “Most or many producers when they bottle, they try not to be aggressive in a way, not to be too demanding to the drinker,” he says. “We don’t care about that. If there is a milder version of the same wine, we prefer the wilder one.” He adds: “What we bottle is not necessarily ‘the best’ – it’s what we prefer.”

It isn’t just about how the sherries are processed, or not, that counts. The other thing that makes Equipo Navazos unique is where they get their sherry from, because the operation doesn’t have its own production facility. Instead, Barquín and his co-founder Eduardo Ojeda, an experienced wine producer himself, travel around the region, scouring bodegas for gems and bringing them out to the world. Often these are casks taken from soleras which have little commercial appeal – while there is a certain market for Finos, Manzanillas and the sweeter sherries, Barquín estimates that very dry Amontillados or Olorosos make up around 1% of sherry sales.

These wines, with no imminent commercial appeal, sit in the dimly lit bodegas, patiently biding their time. In the sherry tradition, such soleras, viewed almost like living creatures, are never discarded. Instead, they are viewed as a kind of inheritance, to be passed down the generations.

“In all the bodegas, especially in the bigger ones, there are many sorts of forgotten casks. I mean, the owners, the cellar masters, the winemakers, they know they are there, but what for? Well, they’re just there, getting older,” Barquín says. “That’s the tradition. For centuries even it’s been like this. Say you have 10,000 casks; it’s not such a luxury to have 100, 1% of them, ageing very old wines and acquiring character with time and so on. So the word is not ‘discarded’. It’s more, well, let it be, forget about it – your sons or grandsons or granddaughters will use it with time. If you don’t sell it or use it before.”

In 2005, during a tasting at a small bodega, Barquín and Ojeda stumbled upon one such solera, a batch of barrels, untouched for 20 years. Inside was an extraordinarily good Amontillado. After a few enquiries, they learned that the owner of the bodega would be prepared to sell a cask for private bottling, and Equipo Navazos was born.

The tale of that first bottling has invariably led to Barquín and Ojeda being romantically described as ‘treasure hunters’, seeking out lost masterpieces in the dusty shadows of old bodegas. Sometimes this is the case, Barquín admits, but often the reality is more prosaic – with Ojeda’s experience in the wine trade, the pair frequently take a much more hands-on approach, working with the bodegas to bring the wine to fruition.

“The tale of that first bottling has invariably led to Barquín and Ojeda being romantically described as ‘treasure hunters’, seeking out lost masterpieces in the dusty shadows of old bodegas.”

What is true, however, is that the operation remains resolutely uncommercial. It wasn’t until 2007 that any Equipo Navazos sherry was even available for sale and all bottlings since have, by their nature, been small scale and limited edition, sold hand-to-hand and distributed round the world via a small and trusted network. This is not a money-spinning brainwave from two ambitious entrepreneurs. After all, Barquín and Ojeda have serious and demanding day jobs.

Instead, their venture is a sideline fuelled by nothing other than an evangelistic sense of vocation and a deep, passionate desire to see real sherry properly appreciated once again. “To us it’s important to put back sherry in the place of privilege where it belongs, or where it belonged for many decades in the history of wine drinking. And we’re convinced that the way to do that, to try to get back to that position, is authenticity,” Barquín says. “To offer the wines as they are, not to try to guess what people like. To offer the wines as they are, raw. That is what has made sherry succeed many times and for a very long time in the history of wine appreciation. It is the only way to go ahead.”

Idealistic? Maybe, but with nothing to recommend it other than word of mouth, the Equipo Navazos project seems to be proof that, in an era when the drinks industry is dominated by PR and aggressive marketing, shouting the loudest isn’t the only way to get noticed – Barquín claims that other bodegas are now following the Equipo Navazos example, producing a small quantity of intense sherries with minimal filtration. “And some of them openly say that they are inspired by us. And that makes us happy. In a humble and in a small way.”

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