Looking Anew at the Business of Sherry - NYTimes.com

The depressed sherry industry needs to do a lot of things to help itself, as I?ve reported in my columns this week and last.

It?s one very difficult thing to transform a business that has focused on making a great volume of cheap wine into one that makes less but better wine. But what do you do with all those extra grapes?

J?sus Barqu?n, a partner in the excellent sherry n?gociant Equipo
Navazos, believes that making more white wine will be an integral part of the solution. Not just any white wine, though. Barbadillo, a very good sherry producer, has been making white wine from the sherry region for more than 30 years. In fact, it?s the best selling white wine in Spain. But it?s not a particularly interesting wine, nor is it expressive of the sherry triangle, bounded by Jerez de la Frontera to the east, Sanl?car de Barrameda to the northwest and El Puerto de Santa Mar?a to the south. It?s not what Mr. Barqu?n envisions.

No, Mr. Barqu?n, who is also a wine writer and a criminal law professor at the University of Granada, believes that sherry producers must make a wine that speaks directly of sherry country. Not being one who only lectures, he and his partner in Equipo Navazos, Eduardo Ojeda, along with Dirk Niepoort, a superstar Portuguese winemaker, have been making white wines in small quantities since 2008 as a sort of demonstration of what they have in mind. They are sold under the Navazos-Niepoort label.

What is one of the most distinctive things about sherry? It?s the flor, the film of yeast that forms on top of fino and manzanilla sherries as they age in barrels. In most wine regions around the world, barrels are kept entirely full to protect against oxidation. But with sherry, a little room is left for the flor, which not only protects against oxidation but is believed to impart the fresh, nutlike, saline flavors that sherry fans adore.

Sherry itself is fortified and has been for two centuries. But it wasn?t always so, Mr. Barqu?n says.

?Two hundred fifty years ago manzanilla was not fortified,?? he told me. ?The Navazos-Niepoort was made in the old manzanilla style, fermented in casks, and aged under flor for eight months.??

I?ve tasted the three vintages ? ?08, ?09 and ?10 ? available so far and they are lovely, subtly inflected with a hint of salty flor character not unlike some of the milder savagnan wines of the Jura. Each offers a different vintage character, and all are worth trying if you see them.

Mr. Barqu?n believes making these wines are a better business model than putting maximum effort into the expensive and labor-intensive solera system if it yields only mediocre sherry. ?Make white wine, good white wine, and make sherry a higher-end product,?? he said.

He believes increasing the production of still wines would encourage smaller producers in a land of vast production. ?Having a wine you can sell every year would be a great thing for a small farmer,?? he said. ?It would eliminate the big debt every year and allow you to put some of the wine into a solera.??

Can it happen? Mr. Barqu?n is optimistic that the market for the wine exists, but he is not sure the will to exploit it is there. ?It?s also a matter of attitude,?? he said. ?You need an enterprising spirit, and the people of Jerez are deeply pessimistic.??

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