Ask a room of sommeliers what they drink on their night off and a surprising number will say sherry. Not the sticky bottle at the back of your grandmother's cupboard, but bone-dry fino poured cold from the fridge, salty manzanilla with a plate of almonds, and old, nutty oloroso that tastes like a library smells. It is the most underrated wine in the world, and one of the best value.

Sherry comes from a small triangle of towns in the far south of Spain: Jerez de la Frontera, El Puerto de Santa María and Sanlúcar de Barrameda, on the Atlantic coast near Cádiz. The grape is mostly Palomino, which makes rather plain table wine. What happens next is what makes sherry extraordinary.

The Yeast That Floats

After fermentation, the young wine goes into old barrels, filled about five-sixths full. Within weeks, a layer of living yeast called flor grows across the surface of the wine like a pale blanket. Flor protects the wine from oxygen and feeds on it at the same time, turning it bone-dry and giving it that unmistakable tang: green apple, fresh bread, sea spray.

Wines that keep their flor become fino, or manzanilla if they age in Sanlúcar, where the damp sea air keeps the flor thicker and the wine saltier. Wines where the flor is killed off, by adding a little more grape spirit, age in contact with the air and become oloroso: darker, nuttier, richer, but still completely dry. And somewhere in between sit amontillado and palo cortado, which start life under flor and then carry on without it. Sweet sherries such as Pedro Ximénez are a separate thing again, made from grapes dried in the sun until they are almost raisins.

The Chalk Under Everything

The best sherry vineyards grow on albariza, a brilliant white soil so chalky it looks like snow in summer. It soaks up the winter rain like a sponge and releases it slowly through the long, hot Andalucían summer, which keeps the vines alive when it does not rain for months.

For a long time, sherry was all about blending. The big houses mixed wines from across the region and aged them in the solera, a system of stacked barrels where the oldest wine is topped up from younger ones, year after year, so the style never changes. It is still how most sherry is made, and it works beautifully.

But a new generation of producers is doing something different. They are bottling sherry the way Burgundy bottles wine: from a single named vineyard, a single hill of albariza, sometimes a single vintage. Sopla Poniente is one of the most exciting. Their wines carry the name of the pago, the vineyard site, on the label: Cerro del Majuelo, Cerro de la Gineta, Santa María de la O. They are often bottled en rama, straight from the barrel with barely any filtering, so they taste the way sherry tastes in the bodega.

How to Drink It

Forget the tiny schooner glass. Pour sherry into a white wine glass so you can smell it properly. Serve fino and manzanilla cold, straight from the fridge, and finish the bottle within a few days, just like a white wine. Amontillado and oloroso are happier just below room temperature and will keep for a few weeks once open.

Then put food next to it. Fino and manzanilla with salted almonds, olives, jamón, fried fish or sushi. Amontillado with mushrooms, roast chicken or a bowl of consommé. Oloroso with hard cheese, game or anything slow-cooked. And a sweet Pedro Ximénez, poured over vanilla ice cream, is the best two-ingredient pudding there is.

Sherry's Second Life

Even if you have never drunk a glass of sherry, you have probably tasted it. Scotch whisky makers have long prized barrels that once held sherry, and the rich, dried-fruit character of many famous single malts comes partly from those casks. The sherry goes into the cask first, then the whisky follows, and picks up a little of what came before.

By the Case

For International Sherry Week: six single-vineyard sherries from Sopla Poniente in one case, or six half bottles of a single pago.

• The Sherry Collection: six bottles, £171.99 (15% off). Buy now
• Sopla Poniente, Cerro del Majuelo 2023: six bottles, £155.99 (10% off). Buy now
• Sopla Poniente, Santa María de la O 2022: six bottles, £193.99 (10% off). Buy now

Each Buy now link opens a pre-filled email to Patrick in our team at pdiggins@houseofdecant.com. Change the quantity if you like and press send.

The Insider

Five facts to bring to the bar.

• In Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2, Falstaff delivers a long speech in praise of "sherris-sack", which he credits with making men witty and brave. Sherry has had good PR for over four hundred years.
• In 1587 Sir Francis Drake raided the port of Cádiz and, the story goes, sailed home with around 2,900 barrels of sherry. England has been drinking it ever since.
• Manzanilla can only be called manzanilla if it has aged in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The same wine aged a short drive inland in Jerez would be sold as fino.
• The flor in a fino barrel is alive. In spring and autumn it grows thicker, and cellar masters say you can see the seasons change on the surface of the wine.
• Some soleras in Jerez were started more than a century ago and have never been completely emptied, so a few drops of very old wine are still in every glass they bottle.

Start With Fino

If you only try one thing, make it a cold glass of fino or manzanilla with something salty, before dinner. It is the drink that converts people. After that, work your way darker, from amontillado to oloroso, and finish the night with a little sweet sherry instead of pudding. By the end of the evening you will understand why the sommeliers keep it to themselves.