The British, who are considerably more forthright and less euphemistic when it comes to nomenclature, call sherry, port, Madeira, Marsala, and the like “fortified” wines, which is quite accurate, since all of them have been fairly liberally laced with brandy. But the term fortified is for some reason anathema in California; its use on labels and in advertising has even been legally restricted; so we get sweet wine, dessert wine, and aperitif or appetizer wine, all of which are at least partially inaccurate and none of which really tells the whole story.
Compared to table wine, the production and use of which date back to the early dawn of civilization, sweet wines or fortified wines are comparative parvenus. They were first produced because the poorly made table wines of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a tendency to spoil when shipped, young and in barrel, from Spain, Portugal, and southern France to northern Europe. Dosed with brandy, these wines arrived in what was then considered good condition. Another important early advantage which fortified wines possessed was their sweetness; a fortified sweet wine (and I am here using the word sweet in its ordinary, nontechnical sense) can generally be shipped without much danger of spoilage. On the other hand, it would be a bold vintner, even today, who would ship a young sweet table wine (such as a Chateau Yquem or an Auslese from the Rhineland) in barrel, let alone in tank car. Except in wine-producing districts, therefore, a sweet wine was always, until comparatively recently, a fortified wine. And a great many people, including almost all inexperienced wine-drinkers, prefer a wine when it is sweet.
A final great and still existing advantage which fortified wines possess is that they do not, once opened, almost immediately go sour. A half-empty bottle of Rhine wine or claret is undrinkable after seventy-two hours; sherry and port and Madeira will lose a good deal in a decanter, especially in bouquet, but they will be altogether potable a week after the cork is drawn.
Favored by practical considerations such as these, fortified wines have acquired a dominant place in almost all countries which are not, on the whole, wine-producing and wine-consuming. Of these, unfortunately, the United States is one. Sherry is not the national beverage of Spain, nor port of Portugal nor Marsala of Italy. Yet most of what we consume in America in the way of wine is fortified wine from the Sweet Wine Country of California.
This may be as good a time as any to give, in some detail, a description and definition of our American sweet wines vis-a-vis their European archtypes or counterparts. If the comparison is in most cases to our national disadvantage, we have only ourselves to blame. Had we insisted on something better, we would certainly have got it. But most of the growers of the Great Central Valley, like most of the vintners who buy the Valley grapes, have never demonstrated either an inclination to acquire or a willingness to copy the knowledge and methods of their better competitors abroad. Happily, there are a few important exceptions, but the average California sherry producer has no real idea of how sherry is made in Spain. California ships some thirty million gallons of port a year, but less than 1 per cent of it is made from the celebrated grape varieties of the Douro Valley—the Tinta. Madeira, the Tinta Cao, the Tinta Amarella, and the Bastardo. Nor have the sweet-wine producers shown much in the way of imagination or ingenuity in the creation of new and distinctive American types of wine. They have (again with a few exceptions) been content to follow the line of least resistance, and the least resistance, so far, has been consumer resistance. For anything in the way of genuine progress which has been made, we can thank, principally, the Department of Viticulture of the University of California.
The sweet wines of California are as follows:
Sherry (including dry sherry, cream sherry, etc.)
Flor Sherry (extremely promising but still rare)
Port (including white port)
Muscatel
Malaga
Angelica
Tokay
Madeira
Marsala
Of these, the last two, California Madeira and California Marsala, are now so disprized that they were not even included in the list of recognizable and distinctive wine types at the California State Fair in the summer of 1947. Made from entirely different grapes, by methods completely unlike those employed in Sicily and in Madeira, they have never been anything but imitations, with little or no right to the names they bore. They will probably disappear, and the sooner the better.
The same thing can be said, on the whole, of Angelica, Malaga, and Tokay.
Genuine Tokay is not a fortified wine. It is made in a small, specially favored district in Hungary from a grape known as the Furmint which is not grown, except on an experimental scale, in California. It is sometimes dry but more often fairly sweet, especially when intended for export; the method of its production is unique and certainly not imitable under the climatic conditions of California. It runs from 9 per cent alcohol to about 13 per cent.
One of the most popular table grapes of California—with large bunches of oval, slightly pinkish, firm-fleshed berries—is known, for no good reason so far as anyone is aware, as the Tokay or Flame Tokay. It is a wretched wine grape and hardly ever used for wine.
California Tokay wine, however, is in most cases not made from the California Tokay grape, and certainly not from the Furmint of the real Tokay country. It is generally a blend of angelica and sherry, with a little port added to give it a pinkish color. It runs from 19 ½ to 21 per cent alcohol, and it is nothing that deserves a place in a respectable cellar.
Angelica (and here is an American invention, though surely one of which we have no reason to be very proud) would be classified in most countries not as a wine but as a mistelle, or fortified grape juice. It is extremely sweet, highly alcoholic, generally sold when quite young since it gains nothing with age, golden in color, and usually made from the commoner varieties of red grape in the mass-production areas. It, too, deserves to disappear.
Pinterest
