PX SHERRY

Our recent chats about sweet wine have had chins wagging so, just one more - Lustau’s Pedro Ximenez Murillo (£19.50, 50 cl at Waitrose). The Wine Trade call it ‘PX’ by the way.

If you like sweet, you’re ‘gonna love this deep mahogany coloured, dense, rich, viscous, complex, caramel, nutty, raisin-fig beauty. Shhh, it’s also delicious poured over ice cream! 

PX is the grape by the way. I know it sounds like Real Madrid’s expensive new signing but it’s a variety found in Andalucia in southern Spain around the white walled, must-visit town of Jerez. Lustau harvest the PX grapes from their celebrated Las Cruces vineyard.

Coming from the ‘hot south’ the acidity (that’s the stuff that makes your mouth water) is only moderate which emphasises the wine’s sweetness even more. 

PX is made in the traditional Jerez method where the late-picked sugar rich grapes are dried on straw mats in the baking sun for about two weeks, a process that drives out the water to leave raisin-like, ultra sugar-rich grapes.

The fermentation of these grapes starts slowly and at about 5 degrees of alcohol on the dial, the wine is fortified with grape spirit. This high strength spirit kills the fermentation stone dead, boosting the total alcohol and, importantly, retaining all the natural sugars. The result is a very sweet, 17% abv. high alcohol beauty (for the Clandon anorak the sugar is an amazing 400 grams per litre). 

These fine wines go through the typically Spanish ‘solera system’ where younger wines are added to slightly older wines over many years in a cascade arrangement of barrels - the younger wines adding vitality to the older, complex wines. The final (solera) wine is therefore an aged, blended beauty. Lustau’s Murillo PX is aged for an average of 15 years!

So, my blog’s sweet season ends with a seriously sweet wine. As the winter disappears and spring surrounds us, see you over a glass of sparkling wine next month!