Took a wrong turn in Jerez and came across these old tiles on the wall of a shut down restaurant. So maybe it wasn’t such a wrong turn after all.

The last time I was in Jerez for Vinoble in 2024 I stayed at two different hotels as I had won a night at 5 star GL Casa Palacio María Luisa in a raffle draw, but of course couldn’t afford to stay another night there on my own dime. Then I happened upon Boutique Palacio Corredera and booked them (actually for the first night) and, if I’m totally honest, I actually preferred that stay over the…

There is a particular amber that does not belong to summer. It belongs to time itself - to the slow, unhurried passage of years through oak and shadow.

Sandeman Medium Sweet Sherry is not a young wine. It is, in the most precise sense, many wines at once.

The solera system, used in Jerez de la Frontera in the south of Spain, is not a method of production in the ordinary sense. It is a philosophy of continuity. Barrels are stacked - older wines at the bottom, younger at the top. As wine is drawn from the oldest barrels, it is replaced by younger wine from above, which is itself replenished from even younger reserves. Nothing is ever fully emptied. Nothing is ever purely new.

Wisława Szymborska once wrote about the miracle of the ordinary - how a grain of sand contains the history of a beach, how a moment contains the architecture of everything that preceded it. The solera is, perhaps, the closest a winemaker ever comes to that kind of thinking.

The grapes are Palomino Fino, grown in the chalky albariza soil of Andalusia - pale, sun-bleached earth that reflects heat upward and holds moisture below with patient stubbornness. To the Palomino base, dried Pedro Ximénez grapes are added, their concentrated sugars dark and slow, like honey that has forgotten what flower it came from.

The result is medium sweet. Not the austerity of Fino. Not the absolute depth of a pure Pedro Ximénez. Something between - a measured middle ground, which is, as any honest person knows, often the most interesting place to stand.

The color is mahogany-amber. Held to winter light - and here I think of Polish winter light, the particular grey that settles over the Roztocze plateau in January, when the pinewoods are still and the air smells of frozen bark - that color becomes almost architectural. A structure of warmth inside something cold and quiet.

Georg Sandeman founded his company in London in 1790. He was a Scot, which means he understood something about spirits that the warmer nations sometimes overlook: that what endures is not excitement, but character. The British connection to sherry is long and not entirely dignified - there was a time when the English market consumed so much Jerez wine that Spanish producers could barely keep pace. Wars, blockades, and shifting fashions eventually complicated that relationship, but the wine remained.

In 1928, a graphic artist named George Massiot Brown drew a silhouette for Sandeman - a figure in a wide black hat and Portuguese student's cape. The Don. He received a modest fee. The image went on to become one of the most recognized brand symbols in the history of alcoholic beverages. Brown, by most accounts, received nothing further. There is something very human about that story. Also something very familiar to anyone who has ever read about composers and their publishers, or poets and their translators.

Szymborska, again - she would have appreciated this. The anonymous labor that produces the lasting thing.

Sherry as a category is protected by Denominación de Origen, one of the oldest geographical designations in the wine world. Jerez, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, El Puerto de Santa María - these three towns form the sherry triangle, a triangle as precise and mythological as any in European wine geography.

Alcohol content: 17.5% by volume. That figure is not incidental. Fortification - the addition of grape spirit during or after fermentation - was historically a practical measure. Wine sent on long sea voyages needed stability. The English merchant ships that carried sherry north through the Bay of Biscay were not carrying luxury; they were carrying a calculated engineering solution to the problem of time and salt water.

Polish sailors knew the Bay of Biscay too. Joseph Conrad - born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdychiv, raised in Warsaw, shaped by the Polish exile experience of the nineteenth century - sailed those waters as a young man before he ever wrote a sentence in English. Whether he encountered fortified wine in the port taverns of Marseille or Genoa is unrecorded. But Conrad understood, as few writers have, how a single object can carry the weight of an entire history. A ship's log. A river. A bottle on a shelf in a provisioner's window.

The aroma of Sandeman Medium Sweet contains notes of dried fruit - figs, raisins, perhaps a suggestion of date - alongside roasted nuts and a thread of warm spice. These are not bright, assertive scents. They are the scents of patience. Of something that has been waiting in the dark for longer than seems reasonable, and emerged without complaint.

There is a shelf in a shop. There is a label with a black silhouette - the Don, still standing after nearly a century. There is amber in a bottle, carrying within it the layered years of its own making.

Somewhere in the Roztocze, January light is falling on frozen pine needles. Szymborska is, as ever, asking the right questions about small things.

The rest is geography and time.

More information at darwina.pl.

This was my 5th Vinoble, the prestigious biennial exhibition of international noble wines, held in Jerez de la Frontera. The first time, in 2014, I was invited by González Byass, and since then I have attended with a press pass. This year was particularly challenging due to the knee situation and being on crutches (two years ago I was “just” using a cane). I hobbled around the best I could but…

Off to Jerez tomorrow for Vinoble 2026! The hotel was booked in January, got train tickets last week, cat sitting is sorted… very excited but also worried about how I’ll hold up. I can honestly barely hobble these days, the pain has become so intense not only in my knee but also my damn shoulder. Some days I don’t know which is worse and together it sometimes just leaves me unable to do anything.…