Product Review – Harveys Signature – 12 Year Old Cream Sherry

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Rating

star-rating-4

In A Nutshell

80% Palomino, 20% Pedro Ximénez  @ 19% ABV – moderate sweetness and eminent drinkability.

Defined as ‘a premium cream sherry’, a category that I would have originally thought to be an oxymoron. Someone once described the Signature Blend as ‘upmarket Bristol cream’ – seems legit.

Basically, it’s ‘just’ a superior blended cream sherry. Tastes kinda like a regular Bristol Cream but it with, perhaps, additional complexity and…balance.  There is nothing particularly remarkable or memorable asides from this.

But you don’t always need reinvent the wheel, do you?  

Signature By Harveys - 12 Year Old Blended Cream Sherry
Approved..

We taste it, stuff happens

Nose

Smells like a goddamn Christmas cake. Dried raisins, sultanas and figs, honey roasted nuts, cloves, allspice berries, candied citrus peels. Lots going on and very easy to pick it all up.

Palette

I guess the closest thing it reminds me to is a Manzanilla – but maybe a little more sweet and ‘over the top’.

On the tongue there’s, I suppose, average levels of sweetness (for a sherry, anyway) – it is honeyed but not too much. This balance avoids the cloying richness of some PX sherries.

I would imagine that there is still a shit ton of residual sugar in this one, but I think the crispness from the acidity that cuts through all of that, giving it a bit of a bite and balancing all that sweetness out.

Fruity, juicy, spicy with a whole load of lightly salted caramel and honey roasted nuts (perhaps honey roasted almonds if we’re getting specific..hmmm?). Everything you get on the nose, you get on the palette.

Very exciting.

Finish

It finishes more savoury, with the sweetness tailing off whilst the body and bitter spice cling to your tongue. It lingers nicely, and for quite some time. More pls

Verdict

tasting britain - i dont always cream sherry 001
Right?

The Signature Blend is probably going to have to fight all the current preconceptions against sherry, and especially the preconceptions against Harveys. Soooo… can we just skip all that and get back into sherry already please and thankyou?

It claims to ‘combine the character and structure of olorosos, the elegant and pungent aroma of finos and amontillados and the sweetness of Pedro Ximénez’.

Well, I’m not sure that’s entirely possible but it is a morish blend indeed and didn’t last very long at all in our tasting.

As  far as good sherry goes, 50cl of it for £12 seems like  excellent value to me. However I wouldn’t say sherry on the whole is good value – if you do the maths on how much you pay ‘per portion’ someone else will have drunk it before you finish your calculations!

(happened to me…true story)

But yeah, good stuff, Harveys.

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