So, a couple of days ago I ran across a fascinating recipe by a chef I follow that he calls “Velvet Sherry Chicken Embrace.” How could I resist? In reading through the recipe I the sudden realization that I know little or nothing about sherry. I’ve always had a powerful drive to know my ingredients——and so I dug in. I got on “the google” (boomers like me like me enjoy putting the word “the” in front of things like; the Walmart, the Yahoo, the Schumpert, etc.) It can’t be explained.

Sherry is a fortified wine which, in a nutshell, means it’s made to have a higher alcohol content than standard issue wine. It’s origins are in the Jerez region of Southern Spain.

Enter the scoundrel, Sir Francis Drake, who became keenly interested in all of the gold and loot the Spanish were bringing back from the new world (stolen from the native Americans while they were, no doubt, ogling the Spanish women). So in 1587 Francis sailed his happy ass into the Port Of Cadez, Spain and, instead of gold and other loot he happened onto whatever was on the dock and made off with (stole) 2900 barrels of sherry. We can only imagine that it must have been there for Spanish spring break or something. You could say that he sacked the massive supply of wine which is why, to this day, the sherry loving English still refer to sherry as “sack.”

Now, there’s a lot more to this story, but the good news for me is that the sort of sherry I need to add to my highly seductive chicken recipe is the $12 wino grade stuff, which brings me full circle to the other reason I got interested in the origins of sherry, which is this:

Years ago my dad told me that he started noticing that by the time he had turned eighty he, pretty much, knew just about everything. The caveat is of course that he was simultaneously realizing that nobody gave a shit.

As I approach eighty and rapidly take on expertise about things like sherry——and close in on knowing just about everything, I am simultaneously realizing that nobody in my circle of family and acquaintances really give a shit.
As my daughter, Julia, always says, it is what it is. Asi’ es la vida!