Il Digestivo

This post on Sherry was dutifully written by Il Digestivo’s chief digestivo correspondent, Il Dottore, following a recent trip the south. Enjoy.

While jaunting through the American southeast in August heat, I turned to Savannah’s most elegant accommodations for an after dinner experience.  The Eliza Thompson House boasts a crystal decanter in its parlor replete with a sherry* that although on the sweeter side was an enjoyable nightcap to sip, complements of the establishment.  It felt appropriately anglophilic to be drinking Sherry in James Oglethorpe’s ( a British general, member of Parlimant and founder of Georgia) colonial outpost.

After drinking more than my share on vacation, I was excited to find a decent selection of sherry at the local liquor store here in  New Haven.  Of the four of five choices, I went for the bottle with “extra dry” on the label, in hopes of finding a home in Barbardillo’s Manzanilla.  I popped open the cork in the store after paying and poured a taste for the young girl behind the register and the thirty-something hipster manager whom you know well from your own neighborhood joint: he is confident about his recommendations to customers but flagrant in his mispronunciation of french appellations. We all drank a swill and I regretted the purchase immediately.  This sherry could have easily passed for a Sake.  It was exceptionally pale in color and the vague reminiscent of what I like in a sherry tasted more like watered down Marsala wine.

Thankfully I was up in boston the other weekend and my fiancé and I were taken to dinner by my grandmother to one of Boston’s newer high-end restaurants, Bistro du Midi.  I was delighted to see a few sherries and ports on the dessert menu.  I pled with the waitress to recommend one of their four choices, but in the end opted for the most expensive one; I knew I was about to be interrogated by my grandmother for ordering an after dinner drink, so it might as well be worth the flack.  Out came a generous pour of Jerez Maestro Sierra, Oloroso 15 years.  It was served chilled and I loved it.  Just the right nuttiness and bitter finish to end a meal.  At my request, our server asked the sommelier why they serve their sherries chilled and she returned with a peculiar tale: According to this source, sherry can have mold from the casks in which it is stored and thus serving it chilled will mask that bitterness. Neither aspect of that claim makes any sense, but I liked it nonetheless and returned home to pour my Manzanilla over an ice cube as an aperitif instead of neat as I like my sherry-as-digestivo.  I recommend this before any meal, it’s a refreshing way to enjoy sherry.

And yes, Maestro Sierra’s finest did not escape the notice of my grandmother who asked me with her dependable bewilderment, “what does that do for you”?  I replied, “Ask not what your sherry can do for you…”

-Il Dottore

*Editor’s notes: The word “sherry” is supposedly an Anglicization of the Spanish word, Jerez, which is the city around which the Continue Reading »