Fortified wine
5 quotes
Biography
"Your best Sacke[s] are of Seres in Spaine, your smaller of Galicia and Portugall: your strong Sackes are of the Islands of the Canaries, and of Malligo."
"Port is the wine proper to the heavy drinker, and it may be admitted that whereas champagne, claret, burgundy, and hock are all entirely beneficial and indeed, in a well-ordered constitution, essential to the digestion of food, port, and the very finest port at that, can be slightly deleterious. Its charm insidiously invites excess, and excess of port, though not in itself harmful, sometimes discloses latent infirmities. The heavy port drinker must be prepared to make some sacrifice of personal beauty and agility. Its martyrs are usually well content with the bargain, and in consolation it may be remarked that a red nose never lost a friend worth holding, and that by universal testimony the sharpest attacks of gout — are preceded by a period of peculiar mental lucidity. ... No one, I think, ever contracted gout by port-drinking. What can be said is that those who are naturally gouty may find their weakness aggravated by port. Port is not for the very young, the vain, and the active. It is the comfort of age, the companion of the scholar and philosopher. Those qualities of British university scholarship — alternations of mellow appreciation and acid criticism — may be plausibly derived from the habits of our Senior Common-rooms. ... Port, is of course, designed to be drunk after dinner. It should be drunk at the table; only in the masculine calm which follows the retirement of the women, when the decanter travels from hand to hand round the bare mahogany, can it be enjoyed at its best."
"The first duty of port is to be red."
"Any time you are not drinking Port is a waste of time."
"Sherry is a name much misused, and even in the strictest sense applicable to a great diversity of wine, from Manzanilla, as pale and dry as old paper, to the heavy, sweet, brown wine sold under a variety of names often as ‘East India’ or Solera. ... I do not, myself, find that the richer and sweeter sherries serve any purpose that is not more perfectly fulfilled by port, but this is purely an individual judgement. Nothing could be more delicious than a glass of pale, very dry Fino, chilled, at noon, in the height of summer. It makes an admirable apéritif before and at the beginning of a dinner. Like all good wines, it is best enjoyed in tranquillity; the ‘sherry party’ of recent growth is an abomination to me. For as long, however, as people continue to entertain between six and eight in the evening they will find Amontillados and Amorosos a useful knock-about standby, less deleterious and less expensive than cocktails."