Pour a vino de pasto and you hesitate: white wine, or sherry? In the glass, just seven millimetres are enough to lift the aroma: salty apple, chalk, brioche, a flicker of bitter almond. The alcohol stays under twelve percent. No grape spirit was added. And yet this bottle comes from Jerez, and since August 2025 the label may officially read “Jerez-Xérès-Sherry” again.
That is the headline: vino de pasto is not a modern marketing concept. It is the recovery of an old category that had been officially banned for ninety years. This guide explains what vino de pasto actually is, why the Consejo Regulador overturned its production rulebook in October 2022, how these wines are made, and why some sherry purists still lose sleep over it.
What is Vino de Pasto?
Vino de pasto literally means “table wine”. The term is centuries old and refers to the light, dry whites people drank with food in Andalusia before fortification became the standard. They are still, unfortified wines from Palomino grapes grown on the albariza soils of the Marco de Jerez, with natural alcohol that usually sits between eleven and thirteen percent.
The key distinction from classic sherry: no grape distillate is added. A Fino traditionally reaches around fifteen percent through fortification with grape spirit after fermentation. A vino de pasto stays at the alcohol the grapes themselves deliver. That is low for sherry, but ordinary for white wine.
A vino de pasto can then age biologically under a layer of flor yeast, or briefly in oak without flor. Some producers choose a hybrid: a few months of flor protection, then oxidative evolution.
The historical context: how sherry once was unfortified too
Long before sherry became synonymous with dry fortified wine, vino de pasto was the dominant style in Jerez. Farmers made light whites for local consumption. Only from the seventeenth century onward, accelerated by the success of fortified Portuguese Port, did Jerez bodegas begin to fortify systematically. The reasons were two: stability during long sea voyages to English markets, and protection of the flor layer during cask aging.
In the twentieth century, with the founding of the DOP in 1935, fortification became not only customary but mandated. The Pliego de Condiciones, the official production rulebook, required that any wine labelled “Jerez-Xérès-Sherry” or “Manzanilla” be fortified to a minimum alcohol level. That rule legally excluded the old vino de pasto style from the DO. Anyone who still made it had to use a lower category such as Vino de la Tierra de Cádiz.
That rule held firm until 2022.
The 2022 rule change and what it altered legally
In October 2022 the Consejo Regulador del Vino de Jerez approved a sweeping revision of the Pliego de Condiciones. The headline change: the mandatory fortification for Fino and Manzanilla was removed. Wines that reach the required alcohol level naturally may now go to market under the DOP name as well.
Approval by the Consejo was only the first step. For a Spanish DOP, the Junta de Andalucía and then the European Commission must formally confirm the changes. That EU confirmation followed in July 2025, with official entry into force on 25 August 2025. Only from that date could “Vino de Pasto” appear on labels as a category within the DOP Jerez-Xérès-Sherry.
The same reform brought other modernisations: official recognition of pagos (delimited vineyard districts) as geographic indications, production outside the historic sherry triangle under conditions, and a wider palette of permitted grape varieties.
How is Vino de Pasto made?
The base is the same as for classic sherry. Palomino Fino remains by far the leading grape, planted on the chalk-white albariza soils around Jerez de la Frontera, El Puerto de Santa María and Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Grapes are usually picked slightly earlier than for classic sherry to keep freshness and acidity.
What changes is everything after fermentation. No cask of grape spirit. The wine ages in oak with or without flor, depending on the maker. Casks are typically old American oak from an existing sherry solera. Some producers work with static aging (one bottling per vintage), others still pass the wine through a short criadera y solera.
The result: a dry white wine with sherry DNA. Light alcohol, high acidity, a minerality that comes straight from the albariza, and in flor-aged versions an unmistakable brioche and yeast tone.
Flavour profile: between white wine and sherry
A typical vino de pasto opens with aromas you would sooner expect from Chablis or a lean Loire white: green apple, citrus peel, sea salt, chalk. After a few minutes in the glass the Jerez side appears: brioche, hazelnut, a salty umami note, sometimes a light oxidative hint of dried apple.
On the palate: dry, sharp, with lively acidity that carries the chalk character of the soil. The finish is long and saline. Because of the lower alcohol the wine feels lighter than classic Fino, but the complexity can match it. Some sommeliers compare vino de pasto with an unsulphured, unframed version of what a Fino “could have been” without fortification.
At the table vino de pasto works as a serious white wine. Shellfish, grilled fish, jamón ibérico, aged cheeses, mushroom risotto. Not as an aperitif in a tiny copita. As a wine for the main course.
Pago bottlings and single vineyards
Along the same line as the reform, the pago system gained legal footing. A pago is a delimited vineyard or vineyard district with its own geological and climatic identity, comparable with a Burgundian “lieu-dit”. The Consejo Regulador had already mapped Jerez pagos officially in 2015, with names such as Macharnudo, Carrascal, Balbaína and Miraflores.
With the 2022 reform a pago name may now also appear on the label. That opens the door for single-vineyard vino de pasto: a wine that is not only unfortified but also explicitly carries the identity of one vineyard. For a region that has worked for generations with large blends from multiple pagos through solera, that is a philosophical shift.
Macharnudo, on a raised plateau of pure albariza, is regarded as one of the most prestigious pagos. Carrascal yields wines of intense minerality. Miraflores, close to the sea in Sanlúcar, takes direct Atlantic influence.
The debate: is this still sherry?
Not everyone in Jerez is equally enthusiastic. For traditionalists sherry is by definition a fortified wine. The whole apparatus of flor aging in a partly filled bota, the criadera y solera, the typical saline dryness: all of it was historically made possible by fortification. A wine on natural alcohol, they argue, lacks the structure and longevity of classic sherry.
Reformers point out that fortification only became standard relatively late in the history of Jerez. Unfortified wines came first. Beyond that, they say, the modern wine market has shifted: drinkers want lighter, dry whites with terroir expression. Vino de pasto delivers exactly that, with sherry DNA.
The Consejo itself appears to be looking for a middle path. Vino de pasto may sit under the DOP, but there is also talk of an additional separate geographic indication that makes the distinction with classic fortified sherry explicit. The debate will not quiet down for years.
Producers and projects
A handful of bodegas and winemakers worked with unfortified projects long before the law allowed them. Their wines came to market as Vino de la Tierra de Cádiz or as experimental bottlings.
Equipo Navazos, the selection project of Jesús Barquín and Eduardo Ojeda, launched the “La Bota de Florpower” series around 2010: unfortified Palomino wines, aged under flor, bottled within the La Bota numbering sequence. Ramiro Ibáñez and Willy Pérez, two younger winemakers with a deep historical interest in pre-reform Jerez, work through De la Riva and their own labels on single-vineyard unfortified wines. Forlong and Luis Pérez, both based in the province of Cádiz, also count among the pioneers of the unfortified movement.
Since the 2022 reform, established classic bodegas have begun cautious steps toward Vino de Pasto bottlings as well. Which names will settle as fixtures in this category will become clear in the coming years.
Sources
- Consejo Regulador del Vino de Jerez: Recent Regulatory Changes (official explanation of the 2022 reform, Vino de Pasto and pagos)
- SherryNotes (Ruben Luyten): Towards Unfortified Sherry (historical context, early unfortified projects)
- EU Geographical Indications Register: DOP Jerez-Xérès-Sherry / Manzanilla-Sanlúcar de Barrameda (official Pliego de Condiciones)
- Consejo Regulador: About the Consejo Regulador (history, powers, structure)
- SherryNotes: Equipo Navazos La Bota de Florpower (Florpower series and early unfortified experiments)