Palomino

Palomino is the grape of Sherry, and almost the only grape of Sherry. It covers the chalk albariza soils around Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia, and it accounts for the great majority of the region's plantings. Grown anywhere else it makes a flat, neutral, low-acid white with very little to say for itself.

That neutrality is the point. Sherry is not made by expressing the grape, it is made by what happens after fermentation. The base wine is fortified and then either left under a living film of flor yeast, which protects it from air and gives the bone-dry fino and manzanilla styles, or fortified higher to kill the flor and aged in contact with oxygen, which gives amontillado and oloroso.

The wines then move through the solera, a system of stacked barrels where a portion is drawn from the oldest stage and replaced from the next, so that no bottle is of a single year. Palomino's low acidity and readiness to oxidise, both faults in a table wine, are what make this work. Outside Jerez the grape is grown in the Canary Islands and in Australia.