What Wine Goes With Olives and Salted Almonds?

Chilled Fino or Manzanilla sherry. If sherry feels like a leap, Champagne, any bone-dry sparkling wine or a pale Provence rosé does the same job.

Olives and almonds are not really a dish, which is the difficulty. They are salt, oil and bitterness in small repeated doses, and they will hollow out most wines you set beside them. Andalusia settled this centuries ago and has never found a reason to change.

The wine that grew up on this exact plate

Walk into a bar in Jerez de la Frontera or Sanlúcar de Barrameda and a copita of pale, bone-dry sherry arrives before you have ordered, with a saucer of olives and almonds beside it. That is not a pairing invented for a wine list; it is how the local wine has always been drunk.

Fino and Manzanilla are the same wine made the same way: Palomino grown on the chalk-white albariza soils of Jerez, fermented dry, fortified to 15.5% and left in cask under flor — a living veil of wild yeast that grows across the surface, sealing the wine from the air while feeding on it. That 15.5% is not a rounding. It is the ceiling the flor will tolerate, and the reason the whole style exists: fortify the identical Palomino to 17% instead and the yeast dies, air gets in, and the wine ages dark, nutty and oxidative into Oloroso. A point and a half of alcohol decides everything.

The only real difference between the two names is the town. Age it in Jerez or El Puerto de Santa María and it is Fino; age the identical wine in Sanlúcar, on the Atlantic at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and it is Manzanilla. The damp sea air keeps the flor thick through the summer instead of letting it thin, and the wine comes out finer and saltier. If your olives are green and briny, buy the Manzanilla.

Bitterness is the real problem, not salt

Salt is the easy half. It blunts sharpness, bitterness and the drying grip of tannin and hands back body and fruit, which is why a wine that tastes stark on its own turns round and generous next to a salted almond.

Bitterness is the half that catches people out, and it is worth knowing where it comes from. An olive straight off the tree is inedible, and the compound responsible is oleuropein. Curing in lye or brine leaches most of it away, but green olives are picked unripe and start with far more of it than black ones do, so they finish with more as well. That leftover bitterness lands on top of whatever bitterness the wine already carries, and the two do not cancel out — they stack. A bowl of green Gordal will flatten a bottle that copes perfectly happily with black Kalamata. If the wine is delicate, put out the black olives.

Which tells you what else works without sherry: something bone-dry that brings no bitterness of its own. Champagne at Brut or drier, a bone-dry Cava or Crémant, or a pale Provence rosé — the rosé being the easy crowd-pleaser, dry and tannin-free and savoury enough to cope with brine. Marcona almonds help throughout: a Spanish variety, rounder and sweeter than the standard sort, and fried in olive oil rather than dry-roasted.

Two to avoid, both for the same reason. An oaked Chardonnay has the weight but not the acidity, and oak adds bitterness to a plate that already has plenty, so once the salt has flattened the fruit you are left drinking wood. A tannic red is the wrong scale for a bowl of nibbles — it drowns them, and the olives strip its fruit out in return.

Buying it and serving it properly

This is where sherry goes wrong at home. Fino and Manzanilla are not cupboard bottles to be nursed for a year; they are fragile white wines that happen to be fortified. If I am buying one bottle, it is a half-bottle of en rama Manzanilla, because the faults of sherry at home are almost always age and warmth rather than the wine itself.

• Serve it properly cold — 7–9°C (45–48°F), the same as a crisp white, and in an ordinary white-wine glass rather than the thimble-sized copita, which hides the aromatics. There is a serving temperature guide for everything else on the table.
• Buy half-bottles when you can. Once the cork is out the flor’s protection is gone and the wine oxidises like any white: re-cork it, keep it in the fridge and drink it inside the week. Day one is noticeably better than day five.
• Buy recent stock. Fino does not improve in bottle, and a dusty bottle from the back of a shelf is most of the reason sherry has the reputation it does.
• Look for en rama — a barely filtered bottling, closer to how the wine tastes drawn from the cask, and better with almonds.