A bar in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in 2024, two glasses on the marble counter. The first is a fino as the modern category has been defined for a century: Palomino, dry, fortified to fifteen and a half, aged biologically under flor. The second is also a fino, but the pour is twelve and a half percent, unfortified, drawn from a Palomino vineyard on the same albariza, aged under the same yeast veil. Until 2021, the second glass could not legally be labeled as sherry. Now it can. The change reads as bureaucratic. What it actually unlocked is the shipping rights to a thesis a small generation of producers has been building for two decades.
The Volume Collapse That Forced the Rethink
By the sherry trade’s own accounting, the category peaked around 1979 at roughly 1.5 million hectoliters of annual shipments. By 2022, that figure had fallen to just over 30 million liters, a decline of close to eighty percent across a single generation. The contraction in the vineyard tells the same story in slower motion. The Marco de Jerez was planted to more than 22,000 hectares at its height in the 1970s; by 2014 the planted area had collapsed to roughly 7,000 hectares, with land withdrawn rather than replanted.
The decline was not a failure of the soil. It was the long aftermath of a market built around inexpensive, fortified, cream-style sherry for the British and European on-trade, and the trade had moved on. The cheap end vanished, and what remained was a category struggling to explain why its serious wines deserved attention on lists that had no slot for them. Operators who survived the bottom dropping out have spent the past decade arguing that the answer is not nostalgic. It is to walk the wines back toward the soil that made them.
Like this? The TERROIR Letter arrives every Thursday.
The Regulatory Door
In 2021, the Consejo Regulador of D.O. Jerez-Xérès-Sherry passed an amendment to allow for the production of unfortified fino and manzanilla, provided the wines reach the required minimum alcohol on their own, opening the door, for the first time inside the modern DO framework, to a still wine grown on albariza and labeled as sherry. AFAR confirms the broader regulatory backdrop: “Last year, the European Commission decreed that wine can be labeled as sherry without needing to be fortified.”
The change formalized a practice that had already been happening. Producers who wanted to bottle unfortified Palomino had been doing so under the Vino de la Tierra de Cádiz framework, a regional appellation that sits outside the sherry DO. Bodega Forlong in El Puerto de Santa María, for example, has been bottling unfortified whites including its twelve-percent Stardust cuvée for years, labeled as Vino de la Tierra because the sherry DO did not yet permit anything else. The 2021 rule change closed that workaround and acknowledged the work.
Luis “Willy” Pérez, one of the producers most closely identified with the indie movement, frames the argument in historical rather than reformist terms. “Sherry in the nineteenth century was talking the same language as our generation,” he tells AFAR. To PUNCH he puts the working principle of the movement in two sentences: “We don’t care if a wine is fortified or not as long as it shows its terroir.”
The Producer Cohort
The conversation has a starting line. Equipo Navazos, founded in 2005 by Eduardo Ojeda and Jesús Barquín, is the project most often credited with launching the modern, serious-sherry posture. The pair built the label on a discovery of dozens of butts of aged amontillado at Bodega Sánchez Ayala in Sanlúcar, and their first widely available commercial bottlings, from 2008, made the case that an old butt of well-kept biological-aged wine could compete on lists that had stopped looking at sherry at all.
The next wave is smaller and more vineyard-driven. In 2017, Pérez and Ramiro Ibáñez revived the historic M. Antonio de la Riva label, a nineteenth-century house name that predated the modern DO; the project’s signature bottling is the Macharnudo Vino de Pasto, an unfortified Palomino aged under flor from a parcel inside Pago Macharnudo, one of the named chalk-soil sites at the heart of the Jerez DO. Ibáñez separately runs Cota 45, a single-pago project bottling from three Sanlúcar sites under the UBE name, with Paganilla among the most-discussed cuvées in the range. Antonio Barbadillo Mateos runs the Sacristía AB project, and frames the market gap that drove him into the work: “I saw a gap in the market for serious wines from this region, since everyone thought of manzanilla as something cheap, relatively young and accessible.”
The cohort is organized in part through Territorio Albariza, an association of roughly eight wineries that includes Callejuela, Collantes, Cota 45, Forlong, De la Riva, Luis Pérez, Meridiano Perdido, and Muchada-Léclapart. On the operator side, Nicolas Palazzi of PM Spirits imports the wines into the United States, and Nick Africano of Buelan Compañía de Sacas builds the on-premise relationships that get them onto serious lists. Palazzi’s sales pitch is the experiential argument: “With sherry, it’s mind-bending. You can taste four different casks of the same exact wine and they’re all vastly different.”
Why Albariza Justifies the Bet
The producers are making a bet about the soil. Albariza, the chalky white earth that dominates the DO’s vineyard plantings, contains between thirty and eighty percent calcium carbonate, the compressed legacy of coccolith and foraminifera shells from when the region sat under shallow sea. The mechanic that matters is hydrological: the soil absorbs winter rain like a sponge, then in summer the surface seals into a hard pale crust that traps subsurface moisture for the dry-farmed vines below.
For a century, the trade pitched albariza in the supporting role of a base for a fortified style. The argument the indie producers are making is that the soil was always doing its primary work, and the fortification framework had muted it. An unfortified Palomino from a named pago, bottled at twelve and a half, reads as a serious terroir wine. It does not behave like a base for distillation. The 2021 amendment did not invent that wine. It just let the label say what the glass had been arguing.
The Renaissance Is Just Getting Started
Back to the two glasses on the marble counter. The first is the wine the modern category was built on. The second, now in its third year as a legal possibility, is the wine the next generation wants the category to be. Africano puts the trajectory directly: “I think the real renaissance is just getting started.” The producers know the market is small. They are not building for volume. They are building for a future in which a sommelier reaches for a bottle of unfortified Palomino from Macharnudo the same way they reach for a Côte de Beaune village wine, with the expectation of place rather than style. The amendment is paperwork. The argument the cohort is making is older than paperwork: the wine was always there. It just needed to be allowed to say its own name.
The TERROIR Letter
The story behind every bottle.
One feature. One dispatch. One bottle worth opening. Every Thursday — free.