Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [10]
Sack was the wine of a single year, unlike the sherry of today, which is blended from the wines of a number of years by the solera system. Nowadays the buyer knows what to expect, because sherry producers have house styles; then, it was unpredictable, with wines from the same vintage developing differently in different casks: more or less dry, more or less rich. The conclusion of the writer William Younger was that “Sherry-Sack was Sherry before Sherry became civilized.”
Where authorities come to intellectual blows is over the origin of the name sack. H. Warner Allen, in his A History of Wine, refers sardonically to those English writers who thought that sack was a corruption of seco, meaning “dry”: their problem was their ignorance of Spanish. His conviction was that it came from the Spanish verb sacar, one meaning of which was “to take out commodities from where they were produced to another country: to export.” Therefore, wines invoiced as vinos de saca, or wines for export, were soon nicknamed sack. Younger, in his Gods, Men, and Wine, kindly agrees that this argument has a respectable basis, yet is convinced that nevertheless it is wrong. Clearly a practical man, he points out that “sack wine is wine made with a sack,” that is, wine made with grape juice strained through a sack, a technique that had been used through the ages; also a scholar, he is careful to buttress his argument with evidence from a contemporary winemaking manual. The only point on which all can agree is that the sack beloved of early modern England bears some resemblance to the sherry of today, but to what extent no one really knows. Also unanswerable is the question, why is sherry now out of fashion and drunk by only a minority?
What did Jane Austen recommend for heartache?
A SPELL living in the heart of Bath would prove enough to rid the most sentimental of Jane Austen devotees of images of gentility, elegance, delicate (though ruthless) intrigue, and the dedicated maintenance of appearances. Now, the city after dark echoes to the cider-fueled roars of matted-haired traveling folk with mangy dogs on strings and corporate discos from the Pump Room, where, in the daylight, one may still take the brackish, ferrous waters and wonder how on earth they ever caught on. The shade of Beau Nash has not walked for many a year, driven out by the allegedly hilarious “Ghost Walk,” and by daylight, the glorious honey-colored Regency stonework is almost obliterated by bewildered tourists dodging tat-sellers, tuneless buskers, unicycle specialists, and oddly desolate locals.
But outside the organized Jane Austen walks one can still from time to time encounter what the fanciful might consider the bottled essence of the great novelist, as indeed one of us did: a single, inexplicable, bottle of Klein Constantia in an otherwise depressing low-end bottle shop smelling of cheap cigarettes and damp carpet (a very damp city, Bath). We did not inquire how it got there, to avoid arousing suspicion, but just snapped it up and carried it home, a faint memory stirring in the brain.
Memory did not lie. In chapter thirty of Sense and Sensibility Elinor enters the drawing room, having left her sister lying in bed, prostrated by the disappointments of the heart. There she is “joined by Mrs. Jennings, with a wine-glass, full of something, in her hand.” How that “something” captures the hopeful anticipation of the wine drinker; no abstainer, Miss Austen, to choose such a precise and evocative word. And the mystery is soon resolved: