Variety:  Palomino

Region of Origin: Jerez, Spain

 Tasting Notes

The palate is packed with raisins, prune juice, chocolate and dates. It is rich, sweet and spicey, with bite but gentle. The finish is demi-sec. The wine is complex, excirting and different. A beautiful way to end your meal.

 Wine Making

The winemaker is Jose Luis ('Pepe') Infante. Palomino wines are aged in two phases: initial winemaking and ageing takes place in a processing bodega right in the vineyard. Palomino Fino is picked in early morning into small baskets to avoid fermentation, bruising and browning. Bunches are then destemmed, pressed as whole grapes and fermented under temperature control in stainless tanks. The first press is aged as Fino and the second becomes part of the selection for Oloroso. To become ‘Sherry’, the young wines are filtered and racked into a stainless tank where fortifying spirit is added, then racked again to barrel (the 500 litre ‘bota’) where flor yeast in the bodega auto-innoculates and spreads over the wine. The base wine, tasting of chalk and lemon, spends a year in the vineyard winery gaining its first layer of ‘sherryishness’ in barrel under flor before transfer to the Jerez bodega1. On arrival, the young sherry is re-filtered and held in tank as añada – young wine ready for solera maturation. As needed, it’s introduced into the youngest criadera the target solera.

The Vineyards

Sánchez Romate was founded in the late 18th century by Juan Sánchez de la Torre, and is one of the few Jerez wineries still in the hands of local, family owners. It is a mid- sized sherry house, with 70 hectares of the best white albariza soils of Jerez on the famed Pago Balbaína, about 8 km west of Jerez towards Sanlúcar. This is an area of gentle rolling hills, with situation being critical – altitude and aspect are highly influential in the possibility of growing truly ‘fino’ fruit. The friable chalk soils are very deep and humid, retaining moisture like a sponge, allowing un-irrigated Palomino to grow roots up to 20m deep.