Sherry is making news on the menus of stylish bars everywhere. Take the One in a Melon cocktail served up at both Toronto locations of Little Sister Dutch Indonesian Food Bar. This sassy number features Tio Pepe Fino sherry in combination with melon liqueur, Southern Comfort, pineapple juice and lime, to deliver a savoury yet sweetish sipper with subtle vacation vibes. 

As a quick backgrounder, sherry is a Spanish-made fortified wine that can be super-sweet or bone-dry. From a cocktail-making point of view, Fino and Manzanillo sherries fall into the dry category, and because they are protected from oxygen during development, they retain a certain freshness, which some might even call salty or marine. That complexity makes sherry a brilliant, big-flavour ingredient for ambitious bar chefs. 

It’s a world apart from the uber-sweet Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry that many dismiss as their grandmother’s preferred tipple. Robin Wynne, GM and bar manager at Little Sister, is a sherry enthusiast. “Nowadays, many bartenders use all sorts of sherries in cocktails, sometimes for flavour, sometimes for lower ABV [alcohol by volume], and sometimes to dry out a cocktail if it’s too sweet (getting the balance right),” he says. “Because of this, I think many people who don’t come from a sherry-drinking background are now tasting and enjoying sherry.”

Wynne recommends picking up a bottle of classic Tio Pepe Fino sherry to add to your home bar. Of course you can try re-creating one of his melon creations (recipe, below) or you can whip up one of his after-work favourites. “I simply order a Tio Pepe and soda, garnished with an olive or two and a lemon zest. The salty, briny flavours of the olive work wonders when drinking this. Again, less sugar and alcohol than a traditional cocktail or beer, and the ‘spicier’ [more carbonated] the sparkling water or soda the better.” 

One in a Melon

Recipe from Little Sister Dutch Indonesian Food Bar

Ingredients:

1.5 oz. pineapple juice
0.5 oz. lime juice
0.75 oz. Southern Comfort
0.75 oz. Tio Pepe Fino sherry
0.75 oz. melon liqueur
0.25 oz. simple syrup 

Shake with ice in a cocktail shaker and pour over fresh ice.

A version of this article appeared in the October/November 2024 issue with the headline ‘Not Your Grandmother’s Sherry’, p. 55.