TERROIR
THE FEATURE
Sherry's Indie Comeback: Why Jerez's Young Producers Are Unfortifying The Future
Two glasses of fino sit on a marble counter in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The first is the modern category as it has been defined for a century: Palomino, dry, fortified to fifteen and a half. The second is also Palomino from the same albariza, aged under the same flor — but the pour is twelve and a half percent, unfortified, and until a 2021 amendment from the Consejo Regulador, the second glass could not legally be labeled as sherry.
The category peaked at roughly 1.5 million hectoliters in 1979 and fell to just over 30 million liters by 2022, a near-eighty-percent collapse across a single generation. The producers most identified with the rebuild (Equipo Navazos, Luis Pérez, Ramiro Ibáñez, the Territorio Albariza cohort) argue that the trade had been selling the soil short for a hundred years. Pérez frames the working principle: "We don't care if a wine is fortified or not as long as it shows its terroir." The amendment is paperwork. The argument is older than paperwork.
THE DISPATCH
Latest from this week
US Wine Spending Hits A Record $115 Billion Even As Volume Slides 4%
BMO's 2026 Wine Market Report, released May 12, frames a paradox the US trade has been talking around: total consumer spend climbed three percent to a record $115 billion in 2025, while volume fell another four percent to 362 million 9-liter cases. Direct-to-consumer shipments dropped fifteen percent. MD Adam Beak calls it "a reset" — higher prices keeping value elevated while a structural slide in drinking continues.
Cheval Blanc 2025 Releases After Smallest Harvest Since 1961
The St-Emilion estate bottled only 55,000 bottles of grand vin from a harvest that averaged fifteen hectoliters per hectare, with no fraction held back for ageing. The ex-négociant price came out at €336, up twenty percent on the 2024. Technical director Pierre-Olivier Clouet has been describing the vintage as "2010 without the alcohol," a reach back to one of Bordeaux's modern reference years. Decanter's Georgie Hindle scored the wine 96 points.
THE PICK
DOMAINE HUET LE MONT SEC VOUVRAY 2022
Vouvray is read in the trade as an off-dry and sweet-Chenin appellation; the dry version, labeled "Sec" under appellation rules, is the harder, more revealing format. Huet's Le Mont parcel is the most precise of the estate's three flagship sites, a clay-with-flint slope above the Vallée Coquette whose high green-mica content runs the wine narrow and tense rather than broad. The 2022 reads chalk, green apple, and a long saline thread; lime peel and crushed stone on the close. Rebecca Gibb MW scored it 95 in Vinous and gave it a drink window through 2038.
Decant for thirty minutes before pouring; this is a wine that needs air and a piece of grilled fish to show what the slope is capable of. Around $48 retail, it sits at the same shelf as the appellation's better off-dry bottlings — and makes the case that Vouvray Sec is the format the trade should have been buying all along.
Until next Thursday,
The editors of TERROIR