During the XVI and XVII centuries, when still Spain dictated its reaon to the world, the Spaniards tables, good drinkers, were full of native wines.
As it happens today not all the wines were equally good. There were tavern wines and cheap wines, but both according to the taste of the time were sweet and decanted.

This epoch, known as the golden century, mean the peak and the beginning of the cecadence of the Spanish Empire and it?s also the best century in Spanish Literature. The economical development due above all to the gold arriving from America and the cultural process mark an improvement in the quality of life, at least in some social layers and consequently the taste for good wine increases.
In any case, the main development of Spanish viticulture in this period, is produced in the economical field. The exportations of Spanish wines to the rest of European countries and to the recently discovered American continent begin to convert the wine industry in our country, still done manually, in a flourishing and every time more prosperous industry.

The discovery of America is, as we have already mentioned, one of the decisive facts in the wine history of the Golden Century, because it opened a market within the colonies that didn?t stop growing afterwards. The Spanish wine left for America from Huelva and Jerez de la Frontera. And the trade was so important at that time that one third of the load in the ships going to the new continent was reserved for wine only.
At the beginning, Seville enjoyed the trading monopol with the colonies, and that?s why the wine farmers from the Aljarafe in Seville got more benefits than the ones in Jerez de la Frontera. Later on, when in 1960 the Head of the Fleet moved to Cádiz, the sellings of Sherry monopolized practicly the wine trade with America.
But the selling of Spanish wines didn?t only increased in relation to the American market, but exportations also increased towards England, where Sherry wine became fashionable in the Royal Court, it became also fashionable in testaments and it was even used as an account unit.

The English devotion for the Jerez wines was such, that some British pirates intercepted our ships and resold the precious elixir in the London harbour. The popularity of Sherry in Great Britain is also mentioned by Shakespeare in such immortal plays as Richard the III and Henry the IV.
Sherry though was not the only wine appreciated at that time. In other Spanish regions like Alicante the increasing in the wine production was continuous and it was maintained during the XVII and XVIII centuries. The Penedés wines also benefitted from external trade since Colbert, in the XVII century closed the French market to the Dutch merchants and those had to supply themselves in Spain.

The increasing in the production reached such high levels at the end of this epoch we could even speak without exagerating of overproduction. This affected negativelly the viticulture, because some noble stock varieties were eliminated to plant others more productive, but of a worse quality.