The Fever-Tree founder on a mission to gin up the sherry scene

For Robert Rolls, as for any fine wine merchant, the initials DRC stand for the world-famous Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in Burgundy. But his younger brother Charles is more likely to associate the initials with the Democratic Republic of Congo. As a young man, he contracted malaria while in the country and went on, via a circuitous route, to make a fortune from the experience. It was from the DRC that he ended up sourcing the quinine for Fever-Tree, the premium tonic water brand he created with adman Tim Warrillow in 2004.

Rolls gave up an executive role in Fever-Tree in 2014 (“it’s now too big for an entrepreneur like me”) and has since been looking around for something to do.

Failing to spot such a lucrative gap in the market as premium tonic water, he thought about what else he liked drinking. Unlike his brother, he finds red wine too often gives him a headache but he loves fino sherry — the pale, dry version. Post Fever-Tree, Robert Rolls sniffed around the Andalusian sherry capital Jerez a few times with a view to making and marketing his own, but was put off when he found “they were all down in the dumps about the sherry industry” there. Even fino was thoroughly unfashionable, just as gin had been when Rolls first got involved in Plymouth Gin in 1997.

He was also wary of the dark, sweet connotations of the word sherry. “Everyone thinks of cream, or possibly amontillado,” he said. Rolls now says he’s glad he waited before deciding to focus on a fino-like table wine that is not as potent as sherry. The result is a dry wine from sherry vineyards that has the yeasty flavour of fino but is only about 12 per cent alcohol, rather than being increased by added alcohol to the 15 per cent defined as fino by the sherry authorities.

Thus was born Sotovelo, literally “beneath the veil”, a reference to the layer of flor yeast that is responsible for fino sherry’s distinctive taste. He recruited as his man on the ground another entrepreneur, Thomas de Wangen, who imported wine into China for quite a while. De Wangen had represented sherry company González Byass in China and so had spent time in Jerez, where he fell in love with the region.

Three years ago he and his Colombian wife, Lorna, bought 16 hectares of sherry vines and a rundown bodega just outside the town and are currently painstakingly restoring it. It is these Palomino Fino vines that supply the raw material for Sotovelo, together with a much smaller amount of fino sherry for Rolls.

I went to take a look at the venture with Sophia Bergqvist, a friend of Rolls’s from business school, who has turned her family’s port and Douro table wine producer, Quinta de la Rosa, into a successful business. It was fascinating to listen to them compare the fortunes of the two most famous fortified wine regions in the world (although Rolls dislikes the word “fortified” almost as much as he dislikes fino being called sherry).

As long ago as the 1990s, those making port in the Douro valley in northern Portugal saw diminishing interest in port, so they started serious diversification into table wine. Why didn’t something similar happen in Jerez, asked Bergqvist. Why has there been so little producer response to plummeting sherry sales?

The Douro valley and the port city of Oporto at its mouth are now major tourist destinations. Bergqvist herself runs a thriving hotel and restaurant at Quinta de la Rosa. The rolling chalky hills outside the three sherry towns of Jerez, Sanlúcar de Barrameda and El Puerto de Santa María may not be as striking as the steep-sided Douro valley. Jerez is a beautiful, atmospheric, Moorish jewel. It welcomes a tiny fraction of Oporto’s tourist traffic, however.

As I wrote last November, a group of small-scale producers has sprung up in the sherry region, making table wine from grapes previously destined for sherry, and many of them are very good. Sotovelo would qualify, although I sensed that Rolls, having tasted market domination, is itching to present his wine independently rather than as a member of a group.

Another of Rolls’s characteristics, according to Bergqvist, is impatience. Perhaps as a result of this, the 2022 vintage of Sotovelo, which was the first, was bottled in May 2023 after only eight months under flor.

I suspect rather longer may be needed to make a really distinctive wine. The 2023 vintage is fortunately still maturing under flor in ancient Galician chestnut casks in the recuperated bodega next to the vineyard.

The Sotovelo vineyard is just next door to the first sherry vines of another incomer, Peter Sisseck, whose most famous wine is Pingus in Ribera del Duero. Rolls, Bergqvist, de Wangen and I spent a salutary morning at the historic bodega in Jerez where Sisseck’s finos are maturing. The difference in pace and ethos was remarkable.

The bodega is owned by sherry grandee Carlos del Río González-Gordon, the father-in-law of Peter Sisseck’s daughter. In a flower-bedecked courtyard, we sampled multiple maturing finos from Sisseck’s second vineyard, bought three years ago (Viña Corrales from the first one is already launched). González-Gordon is patiently waiting for agreement on when this second wine is ready to be bottled. “In this business, you can’t be motivated by finance,” he told us. “It’s all about quality.”

As for Rolls, who is still determined to make a little fino as well as successfully launch his table wine Sotovelo, he says he still has “a mountain to climb”, but thinks “fino is a great drink and people will one day realise it”. Just don’t call it sherry.

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