Within the Bounds of Convention

Quince and Sherry Trifle

Appears in

Published 2018

About

I wrote this in 2011, before the current revival of interest in sherry. There are still a majority who would agree with the wife of the wine writer, John Atkinson, that sherry drinking is ‘gentle masochism.’

One of my wine suppliers congratulated me on being his best customer for sherry. I assumed he was pulling my leg and remonstrated that I sold barely half a dozen bottles a week. ‘That’s right,’ he responded, ‘but that’s enough to beat the competition.’ There are, of course, some restaurants that sell a great deal more sherry than I do, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule: in the mainstream, it is drunk very little.