Salud!

I wrote about producing the documentary in the May issue of Unfiltered, which you can revisit here. Elsewhere this year, we have explained the world of variety in sherry wine, explored the business of creating and seasoning custom-built casks with sherry and traced the journey of those casks right back to the oak forests of Galicia.

As with the world of whisky, it’s the people you encounter along the way who make as much impression as the liquid in the glass. We profiled some of the ‘sherry masters’ who we work with in October’s Unfiltered, from Narciso Fernández at Tevasa cooperage to José Antonio Zarzana and his wife Laura Murphy at the Ximénez-Spínola bodega.

As well as bringing our fantastic sherry cask-matured whiskies to life, I hope our year of coverage might also encourage you to visit the ‘sherry triangle’. Our ambassador Olaf Meier summed it up perfectly in his feature for our Scotch & Sherry magazine to accompany the documentary, when he wrote: “There is no bad time to go to sherry country but if you can go to one of the ferias or fairs in May and June then you’ll be able to properly experience the feeling which is so well expressed with the Spanish word ‘duende’, which is impossible to translate simply. In essence, it means getting together with friends and family to celebrate with an expression of joy. It is a spontaneous and passionate feeling that comes from deep inside you, from within your soul and creates magical moments you will not forget for the rest of your life. That’s what Spain and sherry now means to me.”