One of the great wines of the world is increasingly hard to find in Ireland. I'm talking here about sherry, but not the easily available commercial kinds that are marketed by brand. The only affinity that they have with the fine wines of Jerez - where sherry comes from - is the name.

The history of wine and Jerez is very long, dating back to the founding of the city in Spain's Andalusia by the Phoenicians. Later, under Roman rule, the vine prospered still more and even under the Moorish reign, the Moslem Arab rulers allowed the making of wine for sale to the infidel Christians and Jews. In Elizabethan times sherry became a popular drink in England, known then as 'sack', the preferred wine of Shakespeare's Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Falstaff.

Throughout the 1500's English merchants were sending sherry to England and the these merchants were even granted their own church in Jerez. That link has never been broken and famous companies like Sandeman and Harveys, founded in the eighteenth century, draw their lineage from these early merchants. Sherry continued to flourish and by the end of the 1800's Jerez was shipping huge quantities of its wine. But its very success became inextricably linked to its fall. Large quantities meant some badly made wines, and added to this, South Africa and Australia were making and selling cheap, poor copies under the name of 'sherry'. By the early 1900s it was no longer fashionable.

But fashions are cyclic; by 1979 sherry sales were high again. A revolution had taken place in the vineyards of Jerez: where once expensive machinery and cheap labour had meant a high level of manual labour in the process of vinification, the arrival of cheap machinery meant loss of jobs and economies in production. While the growers of Jerez have come to terms with all these changes, sherry sales have dipped since the high point of 1979.

It's possible that the supermarket shelf may have played a part in this. Whereas with other fortified wines like port, the consumer can make value judgements - a ten-year old port is marked as such - with sherry there is no easily identifiable grading system. A good wine merchant can offer advice, but sherry is more likely to be bought from a supermarket these days. This means that the consumer can only make decisions on the basis of price, or worse, on the basis of the last seen advertisement. Changing fashions and the constriction of choice on supermarket shelves have left the consumer with no real access to some of Jerez's finest wines. Next week I'll be looking at the various styles of wines from Jerez and its environs.

Wine of the Week

PX Reserva 1975 (Half bottle)

This is not, strictly speaking, a sherry. It comes from the town of Montilla, which has given its name to the type of sherry called 'amontillado'. Until the early 1900s it was classified as sherry, but now it is the only wine that can be imported for blending into the sherry appellation. It's made from the Pedro Ximenez grape (the PX of its name), a vine that in legend originated in the Canary Isles, was taken to Germany, and then brought to Andalusia by the eponymous soldier, Pedro Ximenez. It makes a rich, luscious dessert wine that ages beautifully. At €21 it's extraordinary value for a wine of this age and complexity. It's being gradually being supplanted by the Palomino grape, so this wine may well soon exist only in memory.

Available from O'Briens Off Licenses.