N.V. Emilio Lustau Don Nuno Solera Reserva Sherry

Emilio Lustau is in Jerez, in the southwestern region of Spain where the sherry industry has historically been based. Emilio Lustau was founded in 1896 by a man who, though trained as a secretary in the court system, grew grapes on a family farm. In the 1940s his son-in-law Don Emilio Lustau Ortega expanded the business, gave it his name and concentrated on exporting and marketing the company’s sherries. Today the 500-acre Emilion Lustau estate is part of the Luis Caballero Group, a fine wines and spirits conglomerate based in Spain. Lustau makes a range of sherries, from dry styles to heavier sweet styles, and is known especially for its single cask Soleras. Robert M. Parker Jr. has often praised Lustau’s sherries, calling them “remarkable efforts for their stunning value. While they are still under-the-radar for most American wine lovers, I encourage readers to give them a try as they are great introductory reference points for how profound sherry can be.“

Jerez is a famous and historic wine-producing region in Andalucia, at the southern tip of Spain. It is also the Spanish name for what English speakers call Sherry, the distinctively nut-flavored, fortified wine. Jerez has been a viticultural center since at least 1,000 B.C., when the Phoencians introduced winemaking to southern Spain. When the Moors conquered the region 1,700 years later, they added know-how about distillation to the wine industry, and the Spanish fortified wine industry was born. By the 16th century Jerez fortified wines were considered among the world’s finest wines of any kind. There are more than a half-dozen styles of Sherry, from dry and pale to sweet and creamy, but the grapes used for all of them are the white varietals Palomino, Pedro Ximenez and Moscatel. There are wineries in this region that specialize in non-fortified wines, though Sherry represents the overwhelming majority of winemaking.