White.

At Macharnudo Alto, the earth is almost white. Not the white of snow or freshly painted walls, but something older: chalk, crushed shells, the pale remains of a sea that disappeared long before the first vine was planted.

Under the Andalusian sun, this white earth performs a rather practical trick. It keeps the memory of winter rain.

Above ground, the summer is dry and unforgiving. Below, the albariza holds enough moisture for the vines to carry on.

The Consejo Regulador describes how these calcium-carbonate-rich soils absorb rainfall during the wetter months and retain it through the long, dry summer. As the surface dries, it forms a crust that helps limit evaporation.

Macharnudo is one of the historic pagos, or named vineyard areas, of Jerez. Its pale hills are a particular place, not a portrait of every vineyard in the region. Other soils and other landscapes belong to Sherry too.

Across the wider Jerez region, the palette extends from the faint gold of Fino to the amber of Amontillado and the deep chestnut of Oloroso.

The colours belong to different wines, different decisions, different encounters with air and time.

Pale Gold.

A Fino can look almost too delicate for its own history.

Pale straw, a little gold at the edges. Almonds, fresh bread dough, perhaps something saline in its aroma. Dry, fine-boned, with a persistence that seems disproportionate to its colour.

And yet it has spent years in a wooden barrel.

Inside the bodega, the wine lives beneath a thin, uneven film of yeast called flor. The barrels are not filled completely, leaving space above the wine where the yeast can develop.

The flor needs oxygen, but it also helps protect the wine beneath it from direct oxidation. It consumes alcohol and other compounds, gradually changing the wine's aroma and structure.

There is something almost theatrical about this arrangement. The barrel contains air, yet the wine is sheltered from much of its influence by something alive.

Fino emerges from those years still pale, carrying the aromas of its unusual companionship with yeast.

In Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Manzanilla follows a related path. Its identity is tied to ageing in that Atlantic town, where local conditions favour the development of flor.

The two wines may share a family resemblance, but neither looks much like the dark, fortified wine that many people still imagine when they hear the word Sherry.

Amber.

The flor does not always stay.

In an Amontillado, the wine begins its life under that living veil. Later, when biological ageing ends, oxygen enters the story more directly.

The pale gold deepens towards amber.

If Fino has the freshness of almonds, Amontillado moves towards hazelnuts, toasted wood, tobacco and spice. The earlier biological character does not disappear entirely. It becomes part of something more layered.

Amber is a particularly beautiful colour for this wine. It suggests something held up to the light, something through which you can still see.

The wine has acquired another dimension without completely losing its first.

The official descriptions of Sherry styles distinguish biological ageing under flor from oxidative ageing, the two processes that shape much of the region's extraordinary diversity.

Amontillado has known both.

Its colour is not simply the result of getting older. It is the visible consequence of a change in the wine's relationship with oxygen.

Chestnut.

Oloroso takes a different route.

Traditionally, its base wine is fortified to a strength that prevents flor from developing. Instead of living beneath a protective film of yeast, it ages in contact with oxygen from the beginning of its maturation.

The colour gathers depth: amber, chestnut, sometimes the warm brown of polished mahogany.

The aromas move towards walnuts, spices, leather and seasoned wood. The texture can become broad and velvety, with a richness that seems almost inseparable from the colour.

Yet a traditional Oloroso is dry.

That is one of the pleasures of this part of the spectrum. A glass that looks rich and dark can have none of the sweetness its appearance seems to promise.

Palo Cortado occupies a neighbouring territory, combining the aromatic finesse associated with Amontillado and the fuller palate of Oloroso. Its development and classification have their own complexities, and its colours can overlap with both.

Here the palette becomes less orderly. Amber and chestnut are not fixed addresses. Wines move between them according to their individual histories.

Almost Black.

Deep mahogany, sometimes nearly opaque, with amber or brown light appearing at the edges.

Its darkness belongs to a different story.

Pedro Ximénez is a grape variety as well as the name of the sweet wine made from it. Traditionally, the harvested grapes are laid out in the sun to dry, concentrating their sugars before pressing.

The resulting wines can be intensely sweet, with aromas of raisins, figs, dates, coffee and dark caramel. Ageing may deepen their colour further.

This is not Oloroso after another decade in the barrel, nor Fino approaching some inevitable final shade. The grape, the concentration of sugar and the way the wine is made have changed the terms of the journey.

Placed beside a dry Oloroso, a dark Pedro Ximénez might appear to belong to the same family of browns. In the mouth, they are worlds apart.

The Consejo Regulador's production documentation describes the different methods behind the region's dry and naturally sweet wines.

The colour has become almost black. The story has taken an entirely different turn.

Back to White.

There is a temptation to arrange these wines like a neat row of paint samples, from the palest to the darkest, and imagine that each shade is simply the next stage of the same transformation.

But the colours of Jerez do not follow a single line.

Some wines spend years beneath flor. Others meet oxygen from the beginning. Some move from one form of ageing to another. Sweet Pedro Ximénez follows a different path altogether.

And the vineyards themselves are not one continuous expanse of white. Macharnudo Alto belongs to a particular landscape of albariza, while the wider Sherry region contains different soils, grape varieties and growing conditions.

Still, I like returning to those pale hills.

The white earth has its own long history, written in marine sediments and winter rainfall. The wines have histories written in yeast, air, wood and the decisions of the people who make them.

One colour does not become another by magic. Nor does the soil dictate the final shade in the glass.

What stays with me is the distance between them: from a landscape that can look almost colourless to wines that seem to contain every shade of gold and brown.

Wine is never just wine. In Jerez, the distance between white earth and dark wine is filled with centuries of human choices.