Jerez de la Frontera

Jerez de la Frontera is a small city in the southwest corner of Spain. It’s a quick bus ride from Tarifa, where we arrived on the ferry from Morocco. It’s a wonderful place, but in truth, it’s famous for one thing: sherry. The word sherry actually comes from the old name for the city, Scheris. The surrounding area is ripe with vineyards, and the city itself has more wineries (they call them “bodegas”) than anywhere else we’ve ever been.

Just sittin' there gettin' better

The sherry triangle of Andalucia is a small area contained by Jerez, Sanlucar de Barrameda and El Puerto de Santa Maria. If you make sherry outside of this triangle, it doesn’t count. The area is reported to contain the three necessities for sherry: sun, water, and extremely chalky soil. The soil literally looks like beige chalk, but loses very little water to evaporation so continues to hydrate the vineyards during the blaring summer heat.

Matthew and Tio Pepe consult

One of the most renowned sherry bodegas in Jerez is Gonzalez Byass, producers of the incredibly popular wine Tio Pepe. A hilarious name, a very serious business owned by the Gonzalez family. They’ve been in business since the mid-19th century, making not only sherry, but brandy, wine, and vinegar. We visited the brandy bodega first, and got to see the early distillation machines as well as the brandy aging (for 15 years mind you) in American oak barrels. More than anything, the scents on our tour were incredible. You could smell the brandy from outside the entire grounds. Inside, the air smelled old, damp and thick with brandy.

While in Jerez we also took a day trip out to Sanlucar de Barrameda, a coastal spot popular with Spaniards in the summer, but also renowned for manzanilla, a dry sherry preferably consumed with seafood. So, we went to the beach and watched the scene whirl around us, walked along the shore (and found tons of cuttlebones), and had a lunch of fresh seafood with manzanilla.

Patio de Alcazar

We also spent a bit of a day at the Alcazar. The most famous Alcazars are found in Sevilla, Toledo, and Segovia. They are essentially palaces built by Islamic rulers when they dominated much of southern Spain.

The only mosque we were allowed to enter, it felt a little weird

The short story is that the history is so muddled with various occupations that these palaces are a fusion of Andalucian and Arabic architecture. We felt distinctly that we had come from Andalucian Morocco to Moroccan Andalucia. Considering our quick journey back to Spain, it is not all that surprising.

Open air windows in the Arabic baths

Jerez was a perfect spot to land for a few days. We relished in new sights, having supermarkets nearby (cheese, apples and salchichon here we come!), wearing tank tops and shorts, and just generally feeling comfortable with familiarity.