Šereš / Xérès

The city now called Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia, Spain, has been continuously inhabited and continuously producing wine for over three thousand years. Phoenician traders established a settlement called Xera or Asta around 1100 BCE. The Romans called it Ceret or Serit, and under Roman rule the region's wine was already famous—the geographer Strabo mentioned the wines of the region in the 1st century BCE. When the Moors conquered Iberia beginning in 711 CE, they transliterated the city name into Arabic as Šarīš (شريش)—a phonetic approximation of the Latin-Iberian name that preserved the sibilant beginning and the second syllable.

The Moors occupied Jerez for nearly five centuries, and this is etymologically interesting: Islamic law prohibits wine, but wine production in the region continued under Moorish rule, serving the large non-Muslim population and the export trade. The Arabic name Šarīš stuck and evolved into the Spanish Xérès (later Jerez). When English merchants began trading for the wine in the 16th century, they encountered the Spanish name Xérès and anglicized it—first as 'sherris,' then, because English speakers interpreted 'sherris' as a plural, they constructed a new singular: 'sherry.' The wine named itself by accident of English grammatical assumption.

The Spanish crown granted Jerez exclusive rights to produce sherry in 1264, after Christian reconquest of the region from the Moors. By the 16th century, sherry was one of the most fashionable wines in England. Sir Francis Drake's 1587 raid on Cadiz—the event he described as 'singeing the King of Spain's beard'—included capturing nearly 3,000 barrels of sherry destined for the Spanish Armada's provisions. Drake brought them back to England, where they sold to enormous popular enthusiasm. Shakespeare's Falstaff delivers a famous speech in praise of sherry in Henry IV, Part 2, calling it a brain-warming 'excellent sherris.' The wine and the word were already inseparable from English culture.

Modern sherry is produced exclusively in a triangle between Jerez de la Frontera, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and El Puerto de Santa María—a legally protected denomination of origin, the oldest in Spain. The wine is fortified with grape spirit after fermentation and aged in the solera system, in which barrels of wines from different years are blended in a fractional system that ensures every bottle contains some wine from the oldest barrels in the cellar. The oldest sherries contain wine that predates living memory; in the great bodegas of Jerez, some soleras date to the 19th century. Every glass of sherry contains traces of history, moving forward through fractional blending like sediment in slow water.