A light sherry should always be served chilled: the ideal temperature for a fino sherry from the Spanish region of Jerez de la Frontera is between five and seven degrees Celsius, never room temperature.
While some people keep any opened sherry for weeks or months, it's better not to leave a half-empty fino around for so long.
"Drink it!" was sommelier Peer F. Holm's advice at the recent ProWein trade fair in Germany. "A fino lives from its lightness." Fino sherry, which makes a particularly good aperitif with olives, loses its fine quality if exposed to air.
"It's best not to leave an opened bottle for longer than a week." If drinking a 0.75-litre bottle of fino in one week is too much for you, then Holm recommends buying a smaller size or a sweet sherry instead. Or you could use the sherry to cook a sauce.
"If I want a fine sauce, I need a good sherry to make it," says Holm.
A close relation to the dry, light fino and its straw-yellow hue is manzanilla sherry.
Holm explains that to bear the description manzanilla, a sherry must be aged in barrels in the Spanish port city of Sanlucar.
Just like a fino, manzanilla should be drunk young. When buying a manzanilla note the year it was bottled to ensure it is not too old.
Sweet sherries such as Oloroso and Pedro Ximenez can safely be stored in a bottle for between one and three years before opening.
"The taste will not change in the bottle," says Holm, who is deputy president of Germany's Union of Sommeliers.
An opened bottle of sweet sherry is still drinkable after six months.
It's best to lightly chill these sherries to between 12C and 14C before serving.
The very sweet and almost black Pedro Ximenez sherry is best suited as a dessert drink or as an ingredient in a dessert. Walnut ice cream served with a little Pedro Ximenez tastes delicious.
"Only three grape varieties are used to make sherry," explains Holm.
The most important variety is the palomino fino with its large, light green grapes. "It's used to make light, fresh wines with low acid content and not too much alcohol." Pedro Ximenez and moscatel are the other two varieties that sherry makers may draw upon.
The basic wine has an alcohol content of between 11 and 12.5 per cent. It's matured under a layer of yeast, known as flor, and then fortified with younger wine before aging in the barrels.
There are two basic types of sherry: the fino type, which has been matured twice beneath yeast and the much darker dolorosa, which has oxidised from its contact with air.
Wine is transformed into a sherry using a process called solera, which employs fractional blending to come up with the finished product.
The process takes place in rows of a minimum of three barrels stacked on top of each other. The finished sherry is tapped from the bottom barrel, which has been filled over time from the top two barrels. The top-most barrel is filled with fresh one-year-old wine.
