The Sherry Margarita and a General Theory of Sherry Substitutions In Cocktails

A deeper dive into sherry, the whiskey of the wine world.

I made two New Year’s resolutions for 2023.

The first was to drink more sherry.

The second was to attempt to convince you, dear readers, to do the same. So in the service of that project, let’s dig deeper into the world of sherry and sherry-forward cocktails. 

If the Bamboo and the Adonis are the sherry-based kinda-sorta-equivalents of stirred-and-boozy classics like the Martini and the Manhattan, respectively, then what’s the comparable, low-ABV, sherry-based version of a complex shaken drink like the Margarita? 

As it turns out it’s just a Margarita…made (mostly) with sherry instead of mezcal or tequila. And it’s really, really good — a genuine rival for best all-around Margarita, period.

In last week’s newsletter on the Bamboo and its derivatives, I argued that sherry can often serve as a surprisingly effective substitute for higher-proof spirits in classic cocktail formats, allowing for surprising and delicious low-proof riffs on many popular drinks.

It’s obviously not a precise one-to-one replacement, but unlike many other types of lower-proof booze, sherry can step into leading roles typically reserved for higher proof distilled spirits like whiskey, gin, rum, and — yes — tequila. Sherry is the Lon Chaney of the cocktail world: It’s the booze a thousand faces.

Chaney, of course, wasn’t just an all-around slot-filler. Much of his versatility came from his technical proficiency, his craftsmanship, and his groundbreaking facility with different styles of performance and makeup. Similarly, if you want to execute sherry-centric swaps in cocktails, it helps to know something about sherry. Because sherry is so versatile — ranging from bracingly dry to aggressively sweet and almost every step in between — not just any sherry will do. 

So today, we’re going to look at different styles of sherry and the various ways in which they tend to be incorporated into cocktails. We’ll go through the main styles of dry sherry and some guidelines designed to help you understand which styles work best for which types of spirit-swapping. And then we’re going to apply those guidelines to making a sherry Margarita — and see how this sort of sherry-for-spirit swap works in another drink as well. 

The Many Faces of Sherry

Sherry is wonderful. Sherry is versatile. And folks, sherry is complicated. You could write a book about and still not cover everything. You could devote your life to learning everything there is to know about sherry and still not grasp it all.¹ Probably people have. 

So I am writing about sherry this week with a bit of trepidation because — as I have said before — I am not really a wine guy. And sherry, of course, is wine. 

But I’ve read several books about sherry, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount over the years from SherryNotes.com and its sometimes corrective posts explaining what other writers get wrong about sherry. 

Part of my aim is to offer an overview of sherry that is broadly accessible and necessarily a little bit simplified. But the other part of my aim is to be as accurate as possible, with the understanding that I have not, in fact, devoted my life to sherry. (Granted, the more I drink and learn about sherry, the more I am tempted to do so.) Take this journey with me. We’re all in it together.

There are various methods of categorizing sherry. Depending on who you ask and what you read, there might be two or eight or 10. Bottles of wine given the label sherry have at times been produced in France, England, and Spain. 

But officially speaking, sherry is a protected category — a denomination of origin (D.O.) — of fortified wine produced in Andalucia in the south of Spain. Fortification means that the wine has been mixed with some sort of spirit base, typically unaged brandy, hence the somewhat higher proof of sherry compared to non-fortified wines. 

There are many, many different production methods, even amongst sherries that are nominally grouped into the same styles. Some are aged under flor, a layer of yeast cells that forms on top of sherry wine and insulates it from oxidation, producing what are known as biologically aged wines. Some sherries are aged without flor, and thus exposed to air, producing oxidative sherry. And in some cases, sherry is aged partially under flor and partially in an oxidative process. 

Sherries are all aged in barrels for at least two years, and often much longer. Sherry producers employ what’s known as a solera system, where sherry is cycle-blended through barrels. 

To understand what a solera is in the simplest, most hypothetical terms, imagine three wine-aging barrels stacked on top of each other. Each year, you remove half a barrel of wine from the bottom barrel, then move half of the middle barrel into the bottom barrel, and half of the top bottle into the middle, while filling the top barrel with new, unaged wine. You continue this process for years, even decades, so that after a quarter century, the wine that is pulled from the bottle barrel for barreling is mixing with wine that is 25 years old. Over time, the sherries produced from this system develop a generalized character and consistency owing to the steady movement from one barrel to the next. 

Like I said, this is a vastly simplified, entirely hypothetical version of how a solera system works, designed to help you understand the concept. In practice, the aging and blending methods are much more complicated and much less straightforward.

It’s incredibly sophisticated and requires a delicate combination of art, craftsmanship, historical knowledge, and science. Hence my comparison, in last week’s newsletter, to whiskey, which is similarly barrel aged and (often though not always) blended using a variety of complex and idiosyncratic methods. It’s probably too reductive to say that sherry is the whiskey of the wine world, but at least in the sense of the complexity of aging and production methods, I don’t think the comparison is entirely without merit. 

As for styles of sherry, I find it’s easiest to think of sherry as existing in three very broad categories: 

• Dry: The most common sherries are dry sherries. The primary dry styles are fino, manzanilla, amontillado, oloroso, and palo cortado. Although dry sherry can be an excellent accent in cocktails, these are the sherries you will rely on to substitute for conventional base spirits in cocktails.  

• Sweet or naturally sweet: Naturally sweet sherries moscatel and Pedro Ximénez are a big contributor to sherry’s reputation as a dessert wine. Both are so sweet that they are sometimes used as quasi-substitutes (typically in bigger portions than the syrups they are replacing) for sugar syrups in cocktails.  

• Sweetened: This style encompasses cream, pale cream, and medium sherries, which are also sometimes used as sweet or semi-sweet ingredients in cocktails. 

The Sherry-Spirit Connection

Because dry sherry makes for the best swaps for traditional spirit bases, I want to summarize the basics about those styles and then suggest some broad guidelines for shifting them into tried-and-true cocktail formats.

• Fino and manzanilla are the driest styles, aged entirely under flor, with the primary difference being that manzanilla must be produced and aged in a small coastal region, giving it a salty, sea-air character. In general fino and manzanilla tend to be sharp, crisp, and frequently briny in character. As cocktail substitutes, fino and manzanilla are most effective as swaps for unaged spirits like gin and blanc tequila. Fino and manzanilla also frequently make excellent substitutes for dry vermouth in Martini-like drinks.

• Amontillado begins as fino or manzanilla sherry, but after an initial aging period under flor, is then aged in an oxidative way without flor. Amontillado is somewhat darker in color than fino or manzanilla, and in general, it’s somewhat nuttier, somewhat more leathery and spicy, picking up more oaky, barrel-aged notes the longer it ages. Amontillado can sometimes substitute for medium-bodied, lightly aged spirits, like golden rum.² 

• Oloroso is an even darker sherry that is never aged under flor. It has a heavier body, and while it’s still classified as a dry sherry, it sometimes has a gentle, subtle sweetness. It’s often much nuttier than other dry sherries. It also tends to have more pronounced tobacco, spice, and leather notes. And it tends to have a darker color and a heavier body. Oloroso is usually your best bet if you’re looking for a substitute for darker, heavier, longer-aged spirits, especially whiskey. 

• Palo Cortado is the hardest of the dry sherry types to pin down, and also the least common, with only about 100,000 bottles sold a year out of some 60 million total bottles of sherry, according to SherryNotes. It’s defined rather subjectively as a sherry with the nose of an amontillado and the body of an oloroso, so it sits somewhere between the two in terms of functionality. In general, the best way to think of it is as lighter, more nuanced oloroso. As a result, it can be somewhat difficult to use as a spirit swap in cocktails, and if you have a really good bottle, you should probably just sip it straight. But with its more aromatic nose and lighter feel, it can sometimes play the part of a lighter-bodied whiskey, like a young, fruity rye, or, less commonly, a barrel-aged gin. 

The best way to understand sherry, of course, is to sample a lot of it. And you should always try a straight sip of any bottle of sherry you open just to get a sense of what it’s like unmixed, even if your intent is primarily to use it as a cocktail ingredient. Sherry mixes well, but like whiskey, it’s also great on its own.

Some necessary caveats: These swap suggestions are generalizations, not hard and fast rules, and I can’t promise you they’ll always work perfectly or to everyone’s satisfaction. There are times when you may want a drier, sharper drink, so you end up using a manzanilla sherry in a slot normally reserved for whiskey or dark rum. And even within categories, sherries can vary considerably. Fino sherry is a coherent style, but it’s not a monolith, and the different brands and bottlings aren’t clones of each other; the same goes for the other styles. These swaps also tend to work better in shaken drinks than in stirred drinks, which can be a little bit trickier to balance, although that doesn’t mean they can’t work in stirred cocktail. I obviously haven’t tried every possible permutation! A person can only make so many cocktails. 

However, I have tried quite a few cocktails using these swaps, and I do think they work often enough to serve as useful guidelines for when you’re first starting to work with sherry in cocktails. 

Thank You Sherry Much

That, in turn, brings us to our cocktail, the Sherry Margarita. It’s really just a Margarita, except instead of tequila or mezcal, it — mostly — just uses sherry. And as you have probably guessed based on the descriptions above, it relies on the driest of sherries: either a fino or a manzanilla (preferably manzanilla). 

The “mostly” qualification is important: In order to get the sensibility of a conventional tequila or mezcal Margarita, you do need to include just a little bit of, well…tequila or mezcal. But instead of the usual two ounces, this version uses just a half ounce of higher-proof spirit, then fills out the base spirit slot with dry sherry. 

Although you can probably make some version of work relying exclusively on sherry, that sort of base-ingredient splitting — half an ounce of high-proof spirit plus an ounce-and-a-half of some sort of dry sherry — is how most drinks of this type work best. 

There is a phrase occasionally used in Hollywood to denote a sequel that is basically a reboot, even though some original cast members may appear, typically in supporting roles, while younger, fresher faces are brought in to carry the relaunched franchise: legacy sequel. This is a sort of legacy sequel to the Margarita, nodding to the original while putting a new performer in the lead role.

I prefer this Sherry Margarita with mezcal — as always, I use Del Maguey Vida — but it works quite well with a 100% agave blanc tequila like Altos or Espolon in that slot as well. The presence of tequila or mezcal does raise the proof somewhat. Indeed, this drink doesn’t technically meet either of the low-proof cocktail definitions we looked at last week. It contains liquors higher than 25% in alcohol, so it’s not a Suppressor-style drink, and, between the spirit and the orange liqueur it contains a full ounce of high-ish proof booze, so it’s not a session cocktail. But it’s much lower proof than a traditional Margarita, and it satisfies the same impulses and urges just about as well. Honestly, this is as tasty as any conventional Margarita I’ve ever had.

(This is the cocktail pictured at the top of the newsletter.)

Sherry Margarita

• 4 drops 20 percent saline/salt solution*

• ½ ounce agave syrup

• 1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

• ½ ounce Cointreau or other orange liqueur

• ½ ounce mezcal, preferably Del Maguey Vida 

• 1 ½ ounces manzanilla sherry, such as Lustau Papirusa or Hidalgo La Gitana

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker. 

2. Add ice, then shake until chilled. 

3. Strain into a coupe. 

Sherry 2000

Just to demonstrate that this trick is good for more than just one drink, let’s see it in action in a somewhat more complex drink that we’ve looked at once or twice before — the Flor de Jerez, a fruited sherry-rum sour from Death & Co. that has made the rounds for years.  

It’s a somewhat complex drink, with sherry, rum, apricot liqueur, lemon, syrup, and bitters. But at heart, it’s really just a lower-proof riff on a Daiquiri, with a hint of rum paired with amontillado sherry in the base. Like the sherry Margarita above, it relies on a half ounce of high-proof spirit filled out with sherry, with the amontillado doing a lot of the work that a full portion of rum would normally do. 

In this case, however, it matches amontillado sherry with golden rum, suggesting I’m not the only one to have landed on the substitution/swap guidelines I laid out above. The nutty-dry amontillado and the not-too-rich, not-too-heavy body of a golden rum like Appleton Estate Signature are natural complements.

I’ve come back to this drink repeatedly over the years, partly because it’s so elegantly structured, partly because it’s such a great cocktail to deconstruct and learn from, and partly because it’s always smile-inducingly delicious. 

Flor de Jerez

• 1 dash Angostura Aromatic Bitters

• ½ ounce rich (2:1) simple syrup

• ¾ ounce fresh lemon juice

• ¼ ounce apricot liqueur, such as Rothman & Winter

• ½ ounce golden rum, such as Appleton Estate Reserve

• 1 ½ ounce amontillado sherry, such as Lustau Los Arcos

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker.

2. Add ice, then shake until chilled.

3. Strain into a coupe or Nick & Nora glass. 

Very Large Dogs Who Cannot Be Substituted for Sherry 

1. I strongly recommend Sherry: A Modern Guide to the Wine World's Best-Kept Secret, with Cocktails and Recipes, by Talia Baiocchi, and Strong, Sweet, and Dry, A Guide to Vermouth, Port, Sherry, Madeira and Marsala, by Becky Sue Epstein, which covers the wider world of fortified wine.

2. I am of course aware that “golden rum” is itself a vague and somewhat disputed category. But I am thinking very specifically of drinks where you might call on rums like Appleton Estate Signature, Hamilton Jamaican Gold, or even El Dorado 5.