Sherry

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

A Champagne winter

Most readers will come to this column in February. “That’s the dead of winter,” you say (if you are in the Northern hemisphere, anyway). But I write at the absolute nadir of daylight. For some years now, I have kept a daylight diary. I generally start in mid-October and go through the return of daylight-saving time in March. It takes that long to convince me that summer really is on its way back. When I started, I simply noted the time the sun rose, when it set and how much daylight we had that day. I eventually got a little more elaborate, noting the phases of the moon and such, and making very brief annotations about significant events. Every year (so far), it’s been a story with a happy ending.

winter

Wednesday

James Jeffrey

There’s a sherry for everyone

On cold nights, a zesty margarita just isn’t going to cut it. You need a bolder tipple: a glass of sherry, the fortified wine favored by retired generals, members of the Diogenes Club and Ordinariate priests swotting up on Thomas Aquinas for the next Sunday sermon. It’s an appropriate drink with which to reflect on the complexity of life itself. You can go from the crispest blanco sherry, through a series of progressively richer flavors, to the most moreish dulce rum-colored sherry. When I passed through Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain’s Andalucía region, every bar was jammed with great quantities and varieties of sherry. I had stumbled — literally, as I was hiking a hundred miles of the Camino from the coastal city of Cádiz to Seville — upon the Mecca of sherry.

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

Ports for any storm

Just as tastes in female beauty have differed widely through the ages — take a comparative glance at the damsels Rubens featured with those of Botticelli (I leave the Venus of Willendorf out of account) — so, too, does the taste in wine vary through the ages. The British critic George Saintsbury was a giant in the field of literary scholarship. He was also an avid apologist for wine, and his Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920) is a classic in the literature of wine writing. A modern reader, however, cannot help but be struck by the prominent place given to wines that have fallen out of favor today, especially such fortified wines as sherry, Madeira and port.

ports