Pedro Ximénez

Pedro Ximénez makes the sweetest wine in commercial production, and one of the few that is genuinely opaque. Poured, it is black and viscous enough to coat the glass and leave it stained; the residual sugar can exceed 400 grams per litre, roughly ten times that of a sweet Riesling.

The method is direct. The grapes, grown mainly in Montilla-Moriles inland from Córdoba, are picked and laid out in the sun on esparto grass mats for a week or more, turning to raisins. What is pressed from them is a thick, dark syrup which barely ferments before being fortified, then aged oxidatively through a solera for years or decades.

The result tastes of raisin, fig, date, molasses, coffee and liquorice, with a burnt-caramel depth from the long barrel ageing. Acidity is low, and the wine is unashamedly a dessert in itself.

Its most persuasive use is not in a glass at all but poured over vanilla ice cream, where the sweetness and the cold cancel each other out and the dried-fruit complexity becomes obvious. It also works with dark chocolate, which defeats most wines.

PX has a second and more widespread role: it is the sweetening agent for commercial cream sherries and medium sherries, blended into dry Palomino-based wine to soften it. Much more of it is used that way than is bottled on its own.

It is grown in Jerez as well as Montilla, and in Málaga, though Montilla-Moriles is where it is most at home.

Its use as a sweetening agent is quantitatively more important than its use as a wine. Most commercial cream and medium sherries are dry Palomino-based wine blended with a proportion of PX, and far more of the grape goes into that than into the bottles sold under its own name.

The sun-drying step is what separates it from other fortified sweet wines. Laying the fruit on esparto mats for a week or more concentrates the sugars to a degree that fermentation can barely begin, which is why the finished wine can exceed 400 grams of residual sugar per litre and still be stable.

The practical advice is that it is not really a drink so much as an ingredient. Poured over vanilla ice cream it is transformed, the cold and the fat cutting the sugar and leaving the fig, date and coffee complexity exposed. Drunk on its own in any quantity it overwhelms.