Another prestigious product made in the Jerez D.O. is sherry vinegar, made from the wines that are produced and aged in the region. These vinegars are aged using the traditional Criaderas y Soleras system. Vinagre de Jerez must be aged for at least six months, while Vinagre de Jerez Reserva requires a minimum ageing period of two years.

The high concentration of aromas obtained through this singular ageing process, reflected in the depth of its mahogany colors, makes Jerez Vinegar a matchless condiment for gastronomy everywhere.

Jerez Vinegar`s unique characteristics are owing to a series of factors. The first of them is its distinguished origin: sherry wine produced from the Palomino, Pedro Ximenez and Muscatel grape varieties and cultivated within the Jerez-Xérès-Sherry D.O.

The vinegar may be made from fortified wines or young wines that have not been fortified. In the first case, they are normally wines that for one reason or another attained an excessive level of ascetic acid during their traditional ageing process. In the case of the young wines, the ascetic bacteria`s action is normally instigated through accelerated acetification procedures.

For centuries, the winemakers in the Jerez region have applied their wisdom towards understanding the process and aiding nature in its slow transformation of grape must. However, over the years they also grasped the idea that sometimes it is better to obey nature when it chooses an alternative; this is how Jerez Vinegar was born.
In the Jerez wineries, each cask is a separate world, even when in equal conditions. The different casks of one criadera level can evolve differently. The foremen at the wineries, always observant of the ageing process in each cask, separate those wines whose acidity level is excessive so as not to affect the rest of the solera level. The wines that had become vinegary or sour were an affront to the foreman`s pride, so they were usually put away in small cellars well away from the wine production areas.

Thus, a series of small, secluded cellars came into being. They were almost magical places, where these wines were aged with the traditional solera system, while at the same time they were becoming slowly and inexorably acetified. The resulting vinegar slowly acquired a unique character and an extraordinary degree of concentration.

What had started out as a biological accident that affected the foremen`s pride became one of the wineries` prized products – a cult object that the winemakers only gave to those they most appreciated. Jerez Vinegar was thus a winemaker`s failure yet at the same time a source of pride. This is why distribution of these vinegars was limited to family members and close friends. These privileged few and the top gourmets, especially in France, have been familiar with Jerez Vinegar`s superb quality for quite some time.

With improved winemaking techniques and control methods over the evolution of wines, there was an increasingly smaller quantity of sour or vinegary wines that came into the hands of Jerez winemakers. However, the vinegar was still made from wines deemed vinegary or sour and later acetified.

Jerez Vinegar`s superb reputation and genuine characteristics have led it to be imitated, with varying results, for a long time. Aiming to maintain its genuine character and guarantee its authenticity to consumers, the Jerez Vinegar D.O. was created. It was the first of it kind in Spain.

Since March 2000, the Jerez Vinegar D.O. is protected by the same Regulatory Council as the Jerez-Xérès-Sherry council.