Blend of Amontillado Medium Dry Sherry

"Medium Dry" names a category before it names a taste. Under the rules of the Jerez Consejo Regulador, a medium sherry is a blended wine: a dry generoso, usually an amontillado, sweetened with a naturally sweet wine or with rectified concentrated must. A medium with less than 50 grams of sugar per litre may call itself Medium Dry. Barbadillo's technical sheet puts this one at 40 grams.

The base is amontillado, which in Sanlúcar de Barrameda means manzanilla that outlived its flor. Fells, the house's UK importer, describes these wines as starting out as manzanillas; once the veil of yeast died away, they went on ageing in contact with air. The house sheet describes both kinds of ageing: under flor, in the phase known as sobretablas, and by oxidation in old American oak butts. The oxidative part dominates and sets the wine's character.

The sweet part is where the sources part ways. Skurnik, the US importer, describes the wine as mostly amontillado with small percentages of Pedro Ximénez, the two aged apart and blended before bottling. Fells also says it is sweetened with Pedro Ximénez. A second UK distributor, Grapevine, calls it a blend of aged amontillado and Pedro Ximénez. The house sheet names Palomino Fino as the only grape.

By the house's technical sheet, the solera sits in three of Barbadillo's bodegas in Sanlúcar (Pastora, San Agustín and Caridad), some 2,349 casks in all. The same sheet gives three years of ageing. It traces the fruit to the house's Gibalbín and Santa Lucía vineyards in Jerez Superior, on white albariza soil. It is a sherry made at the blending bench as much as in the solera.