Spanish Wine & Food Pairing: Possibilities Are Limitless - Culinary Institute of America-Greystone/Worlds of Flavor Website on Spain

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Tapas & Vino, El Mercado de San Miguel, Madrid

Text & Photographs by Gerry Dawes ©2008

In recent years, Spain has become increasingly popular with American wine drinkers. Once perceived as a source of inexpensive wines with an envious price-quality ratio, Spain has become increasingly sought out for the quality of its wines and many are fetching high prices. The American boom in Spanish tapas bars and restaurants (more than 70 establishments in New York City alone), with by-the-glass sales and adventurous Spanish wine lists, has helped introduce a multitude of new consumers to the jewels of the Spanish wine world. 

Likewise, savvy sommeliers around the country, once attracted by price, now by the quality levels of Spanish wines, are giving them prominence on wine lists at a broad range of restaurants, including the mostly highly regarded restaurants in the country. This has also been spurred by intense publicity about Spanish cocina de vanguardia, which has attracted many American chefs and food lovers to Spain where, in the process of discovering Spanish food, they have also discovered the wide gamut of Spanish wines.


Spanish wines are naturally great with the broad spectrum of Spanish traditional cuisines and many of them work well with ultra-modern dishes and cooking techniques inspired by Spanish chefs. But the real revelation is the ability of these wines to match well with a range of cuisines just as the wines of France, California, Italy, and Australia do. 

In this article, I make some broad sketches of different Spanish wine types and equally broad recommendations about some foods they might pair with. With some tasting and experimentation, American chefs, restaurateurs, and wine-lovers will find a whole new world of exciting possibilities within the range of Spanish wines now available in many markets.

Read the rest of the article here.

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About Gerry Dawes

Gerry Dawes's Spain: An Insider's Guide to Spanish Food, Wine, Culture and Travel


Gerry Dawes was awarded Spain's prestigious Premio Nacional de Gastronomía (National Gastronomy Award) in 2003. He writes and speaks frequently on Spanish wine and gastronomy and leads gastronomy, wine and cultural tours to Spain. He was a finalist for the 2001 James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award for Best Magazine Writing on Wine, won The Cava Institute's First Prize for Journalism for his article on cava in 2004, was awarded the CineGourLand “Cinéfilos y Gourmets” (Cinephiles & Gourmets) prize in 2009 in Getxo (Vizcaya) and received the 2009 Association of Food Journalists Second Prize for Best Food Feature in a Magazine for his Food Arts article, a retrospective piece about Catalan star chef, Ferran Adrià.

In December, 2009, Dawes was awarded the Food Arts Silver Spoon Award in a profile written by José Andrés.

". . .That we were the first to introduce American readers to Ferran Adrià in 1997 and have ever since continued to bring you a blow-by-blow narrative of Spain's riveting ferment is chiefly due to our Spanish correspondent, Gerry "Mr. Spain" Dawes, the messianic wine and food journalist raised in Southern Illinois and possessor of a self-accumulated doctorate in the Spanish table. Gerry once again brings us up to the very minute. . ." - - Michael & Ariane Batterberry, Editor-in-Chief/Publisher and Founding Editor/Publisher, Food Arts, October 2009. 

Mr. Dawes is currently working on a reality television series
on wine, gastronomy, culture and travel in Spain.

Experience Spain With Gerry Dawes: Customized Culinary, Wine & Cultural Trips to Spain & Travel Consulting on Spain

Gerry Dawes can be reached at gerrydawes@aol.com; Alternate e-mail (use only if your e-mail to AOL is rejected): gerrydawes@gmail.com

Sherry: Culinary Institute of America - Greystone (Napa Valley)

Culinary Institute of America - Greystone (Napa Valley)

Worlds of Flavor Conference

Interview with Gerry Dawes on Sherry 

Spain produces one of the most fascinating and least understood beverages in the world: Sherry. Made in a spectrum of styles, from dry to sweet and from pale gold to walnut brown, sherry can accompany a meal from soup to dessert. Here to guide us through some of the finer points of tasting and serving sherry is a longtime enthusiast and connoisseur, Gerry Dawes.

Q: Before we start the tasting, can you give a quick overview of how sherry is made?

I recommend that you look at books like Julian Jeffs’ (Sherry by Julian Jeffs, Faber & Faber, 1961) because the fractional blending, or solera, system is quite complex. To oversimplify it, if you imagine a pyramid of barrels, you draw off the wine you’re going to sell from the bottom row, then refill those part-empty barrels from the second row, and refill the second row from the top row. So some of the sherry in each bottle is as old as the solera itself.

If you see a bottle that says “Solera 1950,” that was the year the solera was established. New wine keeps getting added, but each barrel contains fractional amounts of wine from the earliest foundations of the winery.

That’s what gives sherry its continuity and character. It is constantly building on its ancestor wines. The young wine takes on the character of the older wine, so you’re able to produce a uniform, steady product year after year.

Most of Spain’s best sherries are now available in the U.S. The important thing to realize is that sherries now are better than they’ve ever been in their history. The sherry business went through a bad period, but the industry opted for quality, and what we’re seeing now are some of the greatest sherries every made.

Q: And the price is right.

For what you get out of a bottle, they’re very inexpensive. You can get eight to nine pours out of a bottle, so it costs far less per serving than a red wine consumed in one sitting by two people.

Dawes is going to introduce us to some of his favorite sherries. Listen closely to the words he uses when describing them. Some of the aromas and flavors he discerns in sherry are uncommon in Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and other familiar varietal wines.

Note that he begins his tasting with the most delicate wine and ends with the richest. In order from left to right, they are: manzanilla, fino, amontillado, Jerez cortado, oloroso and Pedro Ximénez.

Q: What about serving temperatures for these wines?

The manzanilla and fino should be served chilled. The others should be at cellar temperature, the temperature of a good white Burgundy—not chilled but cool. Never serve the fino or manzanilla warm, and never leave them open behind the bar. Always make sure they’re kept under refrigeration.

As for pairing sherry with food, Dawes has some great ideas.

(Click on link and scroll down to interview and video link.)

From Barrel to Glass

If you ever visit the sherry bodegas in Jerez de la Frontera or Sanlucar de Barrameda, you will see winemakers drawing sherry samples from barrels in a most dramatic fashion.