Tradition has Palomino named after Fernán Yáñez Palomino, a knight in the service of Alfonso X, whose forces took Jerez from the Moors in the thirteenth century. The grape itself is almost deliberately neutral — modest acid, quiet aroma — and that neutrality is the point: it is transfigured by place and process, the blinding-white albariza chalk, the flor yeast veil, the patient arithmetic of the solera.
Every sherry, from salt-pale fino to the walnut depths of oloroso, stands on Palomino. As Listán Blanco it colonized the Canary Islands and sailed with the conquest to the Americas; as "sherris-sack" its wine fuels Falstaff's finest speech in Shakespeare. Few grapes have given so much while tasting, on their own, of so little.