For years sherry was the bottle at the back of the cupboard, poured once a year at Christmas by a relative who called it "a nice drop" and never explained why. It was the drink of trifle and television adverts, filed somewhere between cooking wine and medicine. And then, quietly, the best bar lists in London started filling up with it, sommeliers began naming it as the thing they actually drink after service, and a generation that had worn out gin and grown bored of natural wine went looking for something with more to say. Sherry, it turns out, had been waiting the whole time.

It deserves the second look. Sherry is one of the most misunderstood and most undervalued wines on earth, a category that gives you more flavour per pound than almost anything else on the shelf. The problem was never the wine. It was the reputation. So here is the case for sherry, and a short guide to drinking it like you mean it, just as the weather turns and the drinks start to want a little more weight.

What Sherry Actually Is

Sherry is a fortified white wine from a small, sun-bleached corner of Andalucía in the far south of Spain. Real sherry comes from the so-called sherry triangle, the three towns of Jerez de la Frontera, El Puerto de Santa María and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where the vineyards grow on soils so white they look like snow in August. The grape is almost always Palomino, a variety that makes a fairly neutral base wine and then becomes something extraordinary in the cellar.

Two things make sherry unlike anything else. The first is flor, a living veil of yeast that grows on the surface of the wine in the barrel, protecting it from the air and giving the driest styles their bracing, saline tang. The second is the solera, a system of stacked barrels in which older wine is topped up with younger, year after year, so that no bottle is ever a single vintage and every bottle carries a little of all the years before it. It is less a recipe than a relay race run across decades.

The Styles, From Bone-Dry to Decadent

This is where most people get lost, and it is simpler than it looks. Think of sherry as a ladder running from the driest, palest wine imaginable down to something close to liquid raisin.

At the top sits fino, pale and bone-dry, aged entirely under flor, all green almond and sea breeze. Manzanilla is its coastal cousin, made only in Sanlúcar, where the sea air is said to lend it an extra lick of salt. Drop a rung and you reach amontillado, which begins life as a fino, loses its protective flor along the way, and then ages in contact with the air until it turns amber, nutty and profound. Oloroso is richer still, never grown under flor at all, aged openly from the start into something dark, walnutty and warming, the sherry that tastes most like autumn in a glass. Palo cortado is the rare and lovely accident in between, with the nose of an amontillado and the body of an oloroso, and sommeliers tend to go misty-eyed at the mention of it.

And then, at the bottom of the ladder, the sweet ones. These are not made from Palomino but from grapes dried in the sun until they are little more than fruit and sugar, then pressed and fortified. The king of them is Pedro Ximénez, so dark and thick you could almost stand a spoon in it, tasting of fig, date, molasses and Christmas cake. It is less a drink than a confession.

A Word on Pedro Ximénez (and Montilla)

Here is a small secret that wine lists rarely tell you. The greatest Pedro Ximénez does not come from Jerez at all. It comes from Montilla-Moriles, a separate denomination a little inland near Córdoba, where the hotter climate ripens the Pedro Ximénez grape to its fullest and where the style was, in truth, perfected. For decades much of the PX sold under a sherry label was quietly bought in from Montilla. If you want to taste the real thing, going to the source is no bad idea, and it rarely costs what the Jerez name commands.

Where to Start

If you want to understand what the fuss is about, buy two bottles and taste them side by side, one dry and one sweet, and let the distance between them do the teaching. For the dry end, the Equipo Navazos La Bota 108 Oloroso is about as good as it gets: Equipo Navazos are the obsessives who went looking for the finest single barrels in Jerez and bottled them untouched, and this oloroso, drawn from a cask quietly tended in a bodega near the coast, is deep, dry and endlessly savoury. For the sweet end, the Sopla Poniente El Coscojal Pedro Ximénez 70 Year Old is Pedro Ximénez from its true Montilla home, aged for the better part of a lifetime into something dark, ancient and astonishing, and a bargain for what it is.

One dry, one sweet, and the whole glorious range of sherry stretched out between them. Taste them a week apart and you will start to notice the rungs in between, the amontillados and palo cortados that live in the middle, and before long you will be the one at the dinner party quietly insisting that everybody try a little.

How to Drink It

The single most useful thing to know is temperature. Fino and manzanilla want to be properly cold, straight from the fridge, and treated exactly like a crisp white wine: open the bottle, drink it over a few days, and do not let it linger for weeks, because a fino past its prime is a sad thing. Amontillado and oloroso prefer a gentle chill or cool room temperature, and they are far more forgiving once opened, happy to sit on the sideboard for a fortnight. Pedro Ximénez barely changes whatever you do to it, which is part of its charm.

Glassware matters less than the snobs suggest, though a small tulip, the traditional copita, concentrates the aromas beautifully. A regular white wine glass will do perfectly well.

Then there is food, which is where dry sherry quietly outperforms almost everything. A cold glass of fino with salted almonds, green olives and a sliver of jamón is one of the great cheap pleasures of the table. Amontillado is magic with mushroom soup, roast chicken or anything built on stock. Oloroso is the one to reach for as the nights draw in: pour it alongside hard cheese, a bowl of stew, or a plate of game, and it does the work of a red wine with half the fuss. And Pedro Ximénez, poured straight over good vanilla ice cream, is the easiest show-stopping pudding you will ever not quite make.

Sherry spent a long generation out of fashion, and it used that time well, getting better and cheaper while nobody was looking. That window is closing. The bars have noticed, the sommeliers have noticed, and the smart money is pouring a glass before the rest of the world catches up. Start now, start cold, and start dry. Autumn could not have sent you a better companion.