Malaga takes its name from the city of Malaga on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. But the predominant grape of this Spanish district is the Pedro Ximenes, which is as unknown in California as the Furmint of true Tokay. The Malaga grape, in California, is an excellent and popular table grape, quite incapable of yielding any wine worth drinking. Malaga wine, however, in this country, is neither made from the Malaga grape nor from the grape of Malaga (the Pedro Ximenes). In most cases it is nothing more or less than a heavily baked, extremely sweet, dark-colored California sherry. As such, and carrying the name of Malaga, it is a monstrosity.
It is possible to deal rather more kindly and speak somewhat more hopefully of all of the other California sweet wines except one. That one, and I am afraid it is a really hopeless one, is California white port. Even in Portugal, white port is regarded as a freak, but at least it has the golden color of well-made, sweet white wine. In California, it can be as pale as gin, like bleached angelica. I have never tasted a fair, let alone a good, one; it is only with difficulty that I shall ever be persuaded to taste another.
And now, having kept the best for the last, let us speak of pleasanter things.
Excellent sherry, especially Flor sherry, which is light, clean, dry, and pale, can be made in California out of the proper grapes, with proper aging in small cooperage, and with proper care. Good port can be made if real attention is paid to the essential details: grape varieties, careful vinification, the use of good sound brandy for fortification, intelligent blending, and adequate aging in small oak casks, not in twenty- or fifty-thousand-gallon tanks of redwood or concrete. Good muscatel can be made in California, but with two or three possible exceptions, no muscatel the world over ever ranked as a distinguished wine. And until some gifted wine-producer, endowed with imagination and great patience, arrives through trial and error at something new, this, I am afraid, is the whole California sweet wine story—three potentially good wines, or perhaps two and a half. No amount of billboard advertising and no singing commercials can add to this story even half a line.
Still, if we ever make in California three good fortified wines, or even two and a half, we shall be doing better than any European country has ever done. And along these lines there is some encouraging progress to report.
More and more often we are beginning to see, if not on the front at least on the back label of better California sherries, the grape name Palomino. This is the admirable variety responsible for almost all Spanish sherries; its increasing use in California and the pride that those who grow it are beginning to take in the name are favorable omens indeed. The Federal regulations have recently been amended to permit the production of 17 ½ per cent sherry (dry sherries generally taste hot and coarse if much over 18 per cent) and there is reason to believe that the obsolete and ridiculous California State regulations, which require 19 ½ per cent of all sweet wines, will shortly be corrected to the same end. A few enterprising producers have gone so far as to set up genuine soleras (of which more later), using oak sherry butts, imported from Spain, for the purpose. And most important of all, the technicians of the University of California at Berkeley and Davis have brought over from Jerez cultures of the Flor yeasts which are responsible for the basic character and flavor of Spanish sherry, and have made these available to all producers who are genuinely trying to make something, in California, which tastes like sherry from Spain.
If there was one single suggestion which an innocent consumer might make, in the interest of better quality, to those who are responsible for California sweet wines today, it would be that they take a trip to Europe. The most extraordinary misconceptions imaginable concerning wine production in Europe and the European wine trade exist in California, and have existed for generations. Since the days of Frona Eunice Wait, who wrote a half century ago that the Spaniards take the sherries “for aging, to the equator, in the Mediterranean Sea” (the equator being some three thousand miles from the Mediterranean), California has had little but misinformation about its European contemporaries. The ridiculous old fable, to the effect that California wines, before prohibition, were shipped to France and then back to this country as French wines, is still repeated by a certain number of native sons who have never ventured to taste a Chambertin or a Chateau Latour. And I have repeatedly been informed by vintners in the Great Central Valley that Spanish sherries owe their character and flavor to the fact that they are “weathered,” or left for a period of months or years in casks out in the sun and wind and rain.
This last absurd notion is said to have had its origin in the publication of a photograph in some obscure viticultural paper, prior to prohibition. The photograph showed the courtyard of a bodega, or wine shop, in the Sherry Country, and the whole courtyard, up to the very doors of the low buildings in the back- ground, was full of barrels.
Until recently, all of the principal sherry shippers of Spain exported most of their wine in butt or cask. They had their own vast cooperage shops and made most of the barrels they used; many of them still do. As these barrels are manufactured, they have to be put some place, and when space is short, they are left in the courtyard. Nevertheless, one snapshot of a few hundred casks, almost certainly empty, served to create a legend, and a fair number of well-meaning producers set out to produce “Spanish-type” sherry by a method as unknown in Jerez as it ever was in America. In many cases what they turned out was far better than average—the wine at least had the benefit of a few months in small oak barrels—but it was not “Spanish-type” sherry by a jugful.
Pinterest
