hester lacey buys sherry

FUDDY-DUDDY maiden aunties whose idea of wild living is a small glass of sweet sherry had better start thinking about changing their tipple. Sherry is rapidly shaking off its fusty image. Forget the chilled Chardonnay; the drink to be seen with is an elegantly iced, pale dry fino.

This turnaround hasn't happened by chance. At the beginning of the decade, sales of sherry had reached an all-time low. The situation was desperate. British sales had fallen by over a third from nearly 5 million cases in the early Eighties; worldwide, the market had slumped from 17m cases in 1981 to just 11.5m in 1992. Some frantic image spin-doctoring was called for.

"All the sherry houses realised if they didn't get hold of new, younger drinkers they wouldn't survive," says Magdalena Teare, brand manager for Gonzalez Byass, one of the leading labels. So out went the image of the warm, sticky, dark brown bottle lurking in the back of the drinks cupboard from Christmas to Christmas; in came the light, aromatic, chilled drink, an advertising revamp, and promotions in trendy clubs and bars. "Sherry's a hipper drink than you think," discovered Time Out magazine.

Harveys have gone so far as to repackage Bristol Cream in an up-to-the- second blue bottle. Their PR spokeswoman sees the sherry renaissance as a sign of the Zeitgeist. "The Nineties is about a return to classic values," she says, "while the Eighties were about everything that was new and superficial."

Gonzalez Byass imagine their youthful targets as "Well-travelled, individual, confident in their tastes and lifestyle, and in their twenties or thirties." Sadly, sometimes this clientele hasn't worked out what it's missing. "Yum! This is delicious," said one such, presented with a glass of fino with an ice-cube in, "but what is it? Is it some kind of rioja?"

Others, though, are more clued-up. "It's easy to be put off by the thimblefuls of horrible gloop we always used to get at college-organised social occasions. But in fact it's delicious when it's well-chilled and very pale. You have to serve it in elegant little glassfuls, to be sipped ever so precisely," says one newly-fledged aficionado.

Traditional sweet sherries are still hanging on to 60 per cent of the market, but the more subtle varieties are gaining ground. "The real excitement in the sector is the finos," says Graham Hines of the Sherry Institute of Spain. "Its market share is 12 per cent and growing. Supermarkets are very good barometers, and they have all started producing own-label lines."

"The sherry industry has woken up," confirms Janet Lee, Tesco's wine buying controller. "Sherry is becoming much younger - it's almost becoming the trendy drink, and following the same pattern as port did a few years ago."

Independent sellers are also shifting the stuff. "The old dears' brands have died a death," says Andrew Pavli of the Wimbledon Wine Cellar. "But good sherry is lovely wine, wonderful value - pounds 5 for a good one, where you could pay pounds 6 for a crappy bottle of wine. Lots of thirty-somethings are buying it - we have to make an effort to sell them the first bottle, but then they come back for more without fail."

New fans should lay in a stock: this year's drought will lead to a sherry shortage. It will soon be easy to identify the quality stuff. The EC is to rule that the term "sherry" is derived from a place-name and that only the product of the region should be recognised as genuine sherry. This will drive out poor-quality imitators in much the same way that the notoriously litigious Champagne wine producers have protected the rights to their name. The EC ruling becomes law on 1 January 1996. "Real sherry comes only from Spain," says Graham Hines firmly.