For me, there are two notable quotes about sherry. The first is from George Borrow, who, in 1862, decided that sherry was “a silly, sickly compound, the use of which will transform a nation, however bold and warlike by nature, into a race of sketchers, scribblers, and punsters”.

The second is “I’m going to throw caution to the wind and have a sweet sherry”, repeated every Christmas Day by my Nana between 1984 and death, as she sat in the lounge, channelling the spirit of Alan Bennett.

Of the two, I prefer Nana’s Bennett reference, because she alone proved Borrow wrong, resolutely knocking back the Bristol Cream, yet remaining bold and warlike until the end of her days.

Sherry, much like Vanilla Ice, has had something of a bad rap. Most of us think of it as the sweet, brown equivalent of catnip to pensioners, but a trip to Jerez de la Frontera might just change your mind. Banish for ever thoughts of an old woman’s decanter, and open your palate and your mind to the chilled finos and noble manzanillas of Cadiz province.

Squashed in the gap between the sea and the mountains, Jerez is the world capital of sherry, dancing horses and flamenco, with some inhabitants cheerfully indulging in all three at the same time.

There is no finer sight than a boozy bailaor whirling a stallion round a market square, and if you’ve just stumbled out of a distillery, having tried a wide variety of its wares, it’s a bit like wandering into a Goya painting that’s coming to life around you.

Cards on the table time: I hadn’t gone to Jerez in search of sherry. Friends of mine have parents with a house nearby and, never having visited the region before, we popped down for some sun, because it famously gets 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, which, being roughly 3,000 more hours of sunshine than we get here in the UK, made us Jerez-bound faster than you can say, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, the only available flights are with Ryan bloody Air”.

The first thing I noticed about Jerez was that it smells. Of sherry. And of yeast. And of yeasty sherry. There’s a kind of sweet, invisible haze that hangs over the town, not dissimilar to the one I imagine hangs over the town where Willy Wonka had his chocolate factory.

And just as Wonka’s workplace was the centre of local industry, overflowing with everlasting gobstoppers and racially dubious Oompa-Loompas, so this region of Spain is marinaded in the vapour of the “Jerez” itself. The word sherry is, of course, the English bastardisation of the word Jerez, so the town is named for what it does, in much the same way that I sincerely hope Cockermouth isn’t.

And it’s hot. Very, very hot. While we were there, it was 46C, which meant we meandered very slowly round the Moorish (in both senses of the word) streets of the old town, taking shade wherever we could find it. First stop, the Alcazar, a 12th-century Arabic palace that’s even more heavily fortified than the wine, but whose gardens trickle with cooling pools (water, not sherry) and where exotic sprouting this and curious flowering that guide your path between old mosques and bathhouses and an architectural oddity called the Countryside Gate.

A sign explains that the complex dogleg entrance to this back door to the Alcazar was built for protection as, in its heyday, the gate opened out onto fields and was a direct route into the castle for enemies. It’s an impressive bit of ye olde brickwork, but if it was constantly being used by people who wanted to pop by and kill you, why put a gate there in the first place? I’m no early Islamic citadel defence expert but, surely, rather than a gate, just a bit more wall would’ve been ideal?

Perhaps the architect had been on the sherry. And who could blame him? In London, they say you’re never more than 6ft from a rat, but in Jerez, you’re never more than an arm’s length away from something powerful that’s made from grapes.

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