No less than sherry, good port is completely transformed by proper aging in small barrels. Very like the standard 132-gallon butt of the Sherry Country, although tapering a little more sharply at both ends, the traditional port “pipe,” or cask, is invariably of oak, and the ruby and tawny ports of Portugal spend a minimum of three years in such containers, the true tawnies generally nearer six than three.
At least 50 per cent of the port produced in California is less than two years old when it goes to market, and certainly less than 10 per cent of it has ever been in oak, let alone in barrels as small as the pipes of Oporto. It is legally and perhaps therefore legitimately-? sold as port in this country; most of it is about as different from what is shipped out of the storied wine lodges of Villa Nova de Gaia as a red, sweet, fortified wine well could be.
The things to look for in California port are therefore indications that some special care and attention have been given to its manufacture, such as the name of a specific grape on the label—the Tinta Cao, the Tinta Madeira (let us hope that some such name as Tinta Port is created one of these days), the Trousseau, which was well known before prohibition, or even the fairly ordinary Grenache. Any statement regarding age or storage in oak is likely to be equally significant, since the Federal Government is a pretty strict censor of such claims. Really fine California port is not likely to appear on the market for another five or six years; it is on its way, and the apprentices are worthy of encouragement and patronage.
Muscatel, by definition, is a wine made from one of the muscat grapes. But sparkling moscato is made both in Italy and in Chile; a sound dry muscat is produced in California's Napa Valley, and the most famous wine of the island of Elba is a sweet red muscatel called Aleatico. The muscat, in short, is not a grape but a whole family of grapes, all with the unmistakable family characteristic of an easy-to-recognize bouquet and flavor, but varying enormously as to quality and yield.
The best, as far as wine is concerned, are the muscat of Canelli and the muscat of Frontignan. Experts have more than once described them as identical. The Frontignan branch of the family is grown along the Mediterranean coast of France, around Frontignan and Lunel, and yields a rich, golden, honey-sweet dessert wine which is certainly fine but to many palates a little cloying. The Canelli cousins produce the famous Est Est Est wine of Montefiascone and in their native Piedmont, around Canelli, give a wine used in the making of Ital- ian vermouth. A local bard once expressed the high esteem in which the Canelli muscat is held in Piedmont, in the following terms:
Ma lodato
Celebrato
Coronato
Sia l'eroe che nelle vigne
Di Petraia e di Castello
Pianto prima il Moscadello
This, in case your Italian is rusty, means that “the hero who first planted the muscat grape in the vineyards of [two rather insignificant villages called] Petraia and Castello should be crowned, celebrated, and praised.”
Less than 5 per cent of California muscatel is made out of the muscats of Frontignan and Canelli, and practically none from the best red grape of the family, the Aleatico of Elba. What we get on the West Coast is the muscat of Alexandria, a good table grape often used for raisins, but a very poor wine grape by any standards. A few pro- ducers, notably Beaulieu, have tried fairly successfully to make superior wine from the muscat of Frontignan, and a few, less profitably, to concentrate on the muscat of Canelli. I have yet to see a good California Aleatico on the market, but it will come before long, and all of these steps, so obviously in the right direction, should be encouraged. Apart from these, California muscatel can hardly be taken seriously by anyone who knows and loves fine wine.
California's Sweet Wine Country, as I have said, is virgin soil. It will produce what it is capable of producing only when those of us who can tell good from bad insist on receiving its best.
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