Author: Benjamin Kemper / Source: Atlas Obscura
Williams & Humbert, the cathedral-esque sherry bodega located in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, brims with sepia-toned bullfighting posters, creaky Castilian furniture, and cobwebbed oak barrels.
Sometimes, it even hosts Andalusian horse dancing set to the strums of flamenco guitar. But venture just beyond its stately main hall, and you could be in the Scottish Highlands: There, barrels branded with “The Macallan” stretch as far as the eye can see.To most people who visit the Sherry Triangle—the wine region of southwest Spain bounded by Jerez de la Frontera, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and Puerto de Santamaría—such a sight can be disorienting. But for centuries, the scotch and sherry industries have enjoyed a deep-rooted symbiosis that has kept both afloat through the ages, despite consumer taste varying wildly.
This relationship has its roots in 1587, when English privateer Sir Francis Drake paraded into Britain with 2,900 casks of sherry. The bottles were the spoils of his assault on the city of Cádiz, known as “Singeing of the King of Spain’s Beard.” The kidnapped wine was a sensation among the elite and sparked a sherry craze in Britain—and by affiliation, Scotland—that lasted centuries. Shakespeare, an avid sherry drinker, mentioned it at least 40 times in his works, and famously writes in Henry IV that a good sherry “makes the brain sharp, quick, and inventive; full of nimble, fiery, and beautiful ideas. The voice and tongue give birth to those ideas which, when they grow up, become excellent wit.”
Over time, this unslakable thirst for sherry left a surplus of empty barrels rolling around the British Isles. So it was only a matter of time before the Scots started storing their local moonshine, a clear distillate called uisge beatha (“water of life”), inside them. “Around 1800, distillers in Scotland realized that putting this clear spirit in a barrel not only made financial sense, but also made the liquid look and taste better,” says Mark Gillespie, founder of the WhiskyCast podcast.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of this development. Stuart MacPherson, Master of Wood at The Macallan, calls wood the “singular most important factor in creating a whisky’s character, since up to 80 percent of its final flavor comes from the cask.” (As evidenced by his title, MacPherson’s work involves sourcing timber from forests on two continents, overseeing barrel production in Spain, and transporting the seasoned casks to Scotland.)
That, along with the 1831 invention of the column still (which allowed for continuous distillation), paired with a newfound demand from France in the 1880s (due to a phylloxera outbreak that had devastated French brandy production), cemented scotch whisky’s place in the European market. By 1900, the scotch industry was booming. Across Scotland, warehouses were stacked floor to ceiling, all of them with sherry barrels filled with whisky.
Apart from a hiccup in production during World War II, scotch continued to see rising popularity, especially in the United States following Prohibition. But by the 1950s and ‘60s, a period many consider to be the “Golden Age” of scotch, the industry was changing. Newly-enacted “Standards of Identity” laws in the U.S. mandated that all bourbon be aged in new oak, which created a sudden glut of American oak barrels that scotch whisky houses could buy up at a fraction of the price of sherry barrels. “Whatever was cheapest, that’s what the distilleries purchased,” says Gillespie.
The nail in the coffin for the sherry cask came in 1981, when the Spanish government began requiring that all sherry be bottled in Spain prior to export. Any sherry casks that were sold to whisky makers in Scotland had to be shipped dry, which made the wood more prone to taint and cracking….
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