Join the preservation society… drink fortified wine

The sherry industry always used to admit that 75 per cent of its UK sales occurred in the weeks before Christmas. A large proportion of this was to teetotallers, who needed something to offer the family, or the vicar, or Father Christmas, or whoever happened to drop by over the holidays and was in need of what my late lamented nanny used to call ‘Festive Cheer’. The great advantage of a bottle of sherry was that, after the guests had departed and there was something left in the bottle, it wouldn’t turn to vinegar as rapidly as the remains of a bottle of wine.

That’s the point about fortified wines. That’s why they were invented in the first place. Not simply to be, in the words of Flanders and Swann, ‘a liquor/ that will get you higher, quicker’, but to slow down oxidisation.

John Aubrey wrote in his diary of 1697 (coincidentally the year before my company of Berry Bros & Rudd was founded) how he added salt to his claret to make it taste nicer. This may seem strange, but consider this: glass was an extremely expensive commodity, and only the very wealthy could afford to store, let alone buy, their wines in the bottle until the first half of the 19th century. Wine, even ‘clairet’, or ‘pale’ wine from Bordeaux, would have been bought in, and very often served from, wooden casks. The minute the first glass was drawn from the cask the wine would begin to oxidise and after a day or two it would be vinegar. So Aubrey was actually adding salt to vinegar — nowadays a famous taste pairing.

Fortification, or the addition of spirit to the half-fermented must, slows oxidisation considerably. As a result, from Elizabethan times onwards, fortified wines were prized: port, sherry, Madeira, even Marsala (although the last two are less commonly encountered nowadays).