Sherry Styles (Tasting Notes)

do you mean on these sherries or sherries in general? I drink sherry a lot but don't write notes on most things I drink.

On these particular styles.

By styles, I assume you mean fino, manzanilla, amontillado, oloroso, palo cortado, cream and PX. Clearly I've had all of those styles, and by many producers, but what to say about them. They're very different.

Most people don't particularly like finos and manzanillas on first tasting them if they haven't come from a culture or family that esteems these. Those are pale in color, made to be drunk fairly soon after bottling, with noses that range from paint thinner to nuts to flowers. In fact, there is often a note of dry flowers, like dry chamomile or something similar, and that accounts for the name as well. You often get a bit of a yeasty aroma and taste, akin to a sparkling wine that's aged on lees for a while. And sometimes you get a saline quality, which some people call mineral, others call the "taste of the sea". And sometimes you get iodine notes.

Amontillado is very different, as is the manzanilla pasada. These provide a hint of the caramel, toffee notes that you'll get from the oxidized sherries, but they can also maintain the sense of salinity. They frequently have hints of the toasted nut flavors and sometimes tea as well.

Palo Cortado and olorosos are similar in that they have the full on nutty qualities and these are my favorite sherries personally. The olorosos especially can sometimes have a bitter edge slightly akin to walnuts, but they're generally very complex and they have gorgeous aromatics of toast, nuts, caramel, tea, leaves.

A dry oloroso will be entirely unsweetened and you shouldn't get any sweetness, although our noses are trained to associate nuts and caramel with sugar, and we may expect it from the aromas. You had the Lustau East India but that is not a dry oloroso. It has been sweetened. That's not a bad thing and a slightly sweet oloroso is very good.

Harvey's Bristol Cream?

I wouldn't know.

But a cream sherry is a sweetened one. If they're good, they sweeten with PX. If not, they use sugar, which is technically not permitted, but so what.