A Sherry Course in the Netherlands: Four Nights in Jerez

Sherry has plenty of writing and very little teaching. Articles on flor are everywhere. Rooms where someone pours manzanilla pasada next to fino viejo and explains what happened in the barrel between them are rare outside Andalusia. Twenty guides on this site cover the styles, and not one of them puts anything in your glass.

Which is why a sherry course in the Netherlands is worth flagging, even to readers who will never sit in that room. Le Club des Vins in Rotterdam runs four sessions on Jerez alone, starting 29 October 2026. The teaching is in Dutch, so treat this as a case study first and a booking link second.

Who teaches it

Nadien de Visser founded Le Club des Vins and has taught wine courses in Rotterdam since 2016. She completed the WSET Diploma (Level 4) with merit in 2021, then took the Sherry Educator Course run by the Consejo Regulador in Jerez in September 2024. She now sits on the Consejo’s public list of certified Sherry Educators.

Her route in was a WSET4 case study on the rise and fall of sherry. She returns to Jerez every year, teaches under the banner “to make sherry great again”, and says she built the country’s first dedicated sherry course in October 2024.

Sherry normally gets one evening inside a broader wine course, wedged between Rioja and Rueda. Le Club’s own SDEN2 programme works that way too: session four covers Spain and Portugal together, sherry included. Four sessions on Jerez alone, seven wines minimum each, is a different order of attention.

What the four sessions cover

Session 1, 29 October: from vino de pasto to fino viejo. History first, what Jerez looked like a century ago and what survives of it. Then flor, and a tasting that walks up through biological ageing: vino de pasto with brief flor contact, manzanilla pasada, fino viejo. Food on the table throughout, the way the region drinks.

Session 2, 5 November: amontillado, oloroso, palo cortado. Oxidative ageing, built around a question most tastings skip. Does an amontillado that started life as a fino taste different from one that started as manzanilla? Palo cortado gets its own airing. The night closes on a cream, which contains oloroso anyway.

Session 3, 19 November: the new sound of Jerez. Unfortified wines, blanco de albariza, sitting close to the sobretablas that feed the top of a fino solera. The category is a revival rather than an invention: it faded after phylloxera and the founding of the DO in 1935. Sparkling wine from the region also appears here.

Session 4, 13 December: a sherry pairing lunch. Not a lecture. The pairings De Visser took away from Copa Jerez 2023 and a François Chartier presentation on sherry and food, served at restaurant Walsjérôt in Rotterdam.

Session three is the one I would travel for. Unfortified palomino is the liveliest thing happening in the region, and it appears in almost no curriculum anywhere.

The honest limits

No exam, no certificate. The course page lists teaching, wine and lunch, and nothing else. That is fine if you want to understand palo cortado and useless if you need a credential.

It is also not an entry point. Le Club recommends prior study at SDEN3 level because the material goes deep. Fair warning, and a real barrier: if biological versus oxidative ageing is still new to you, start with sherry for beginners and come back next year.

Then the logistics. Three Thursday evenings running to 21:30, plus a Sunday lunch on 13 December, spread over seven weeks in the busiest stretch of the calendar, all in Rotterdam. Seven sherries on a weeknight means the train, or a spittoon.

Practical details

290 euros covers three evenings and the lunch. Evenings run 19:00 to roughly 21:00 or 21:30, the lunch 12:30 to about 15:00. Booking goes through the Le Club des Vins course page.

Per glass it reads well: 28 wines at minimum, a fair share from bottles nobody opens alone at home. Set that against ten good bottles you buy yourself and the choice is ownership against understanding. I would take the second, though after twenty guides on this region I am hardly neutral.

Frequently asked questions

Is the course taught in English?

No. Le Club des Vins teaches in Dutch, in Rotterdam. International readers should treat this as a model for what dedicated sherry education looks like rather than a course to book.

How many sherries do you taste?

A minimum of seven per evening, across three evenings, plus the pairing lunch. That puts the total comfortably above 28 wines.

Is there an exam or certificate?

No. The course is educational, without assessment or a formal qualification. For accredited study, look at WSET or the Spanish sherry certifications instead.

Sources

• Primary source: Sherry course 2026, Le Club des Vins and Le Clubs Sherry Cursus, session outline, accessed 29 July 2026
• Additional: Sherry Educator profile, Nadien de Visser, Consejo Regulador
• Additional: Our teachers, Le Club des Vins