Bodega San Francisco Javier

Bodega San Francisco Javier is Peter Sisseck's sherry project, and his is the name that gives this bottle its context. Sisseck is the Danish winemaker behind Dominio de Pingus in Ribera del Duero, one of the most sought-after red wines in Spain, and behind Hacienda Monasterio. He has said for years that Fino is the finest white wine Spain makes. In 2017 he did something about it, and set up in Jerez with Carlos del Río González-Gordon, of the González Byass family, who is also his partner at Hacienda Monasterio.

They did not start from nothing. They bought a working solera: the Fino Camborio solera from Bodegas Juan Piñero, roughly four hundred butts across three criaderas, with an average age of eight to nine years. That solera traces back to Ángel Zamorano Corrales, who set up as an almacenista in 1974 in an empty warehouse on Calle San Francisco Javier in Jerez, ageing Fino and selling it on to the big houses rather than bottling under his own name. He supplied wine that way until 2006, when Juan Piñero bought the stock. The bodega takes its name from that street, and the wine takes its name from the man who built the solera.

The second thing they bought was vineyard, which in Jerez is the unusual part. Most sherry is a blend from bought-in fruit; the whole point here is that the wine comes from named ground. There are eight hectares in Pago Balbaína and two in Pago Macharnudo, two of the great albariza sites of Jerez. Pagos are best understood as villages rather than as vineyards, in the way a Burgundian would use the word. The Balbaína plots are around ninety metres up, within sight of the sea, on tosca de barajuela, the prized laminated form of albariza limestone. The vines are around thirty to thirty-five years old and are farmed organically while the certification works its way through.

Sisseck's stated aim is to show that the vineyard matters in sherry, and that a single-site Fino can be more interesting than a large industrial blend. The Balbaína musts refresh the solera, which is dominated by a particular flor yeast strain that gives the classic warm, complex, aldehydic Jerez Fino character. The wine is bottled en rama, that is, essentially unfiltered, so it arrives as it comes out of the butt. It is fortified to 15%, which is where a biological Fino has to sit for the flor to live.

The wine is Viña Corrales Fino, released in successive sacas. A saca is the year the wine was drawn off the solera and bottled, not a vintage in the way you would read a year on a Burgundy label. The underlying wine is the same solera each time, so opening two sacas alongside each other is the interesting way to do it. There is very little of any of them.

This is not cheap for Fino. What you are paying for is a named vineyard, low yields, real age in the solera and en rama bottling, at a point where almost nobody else in Jerez is doing all four at once.