Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [30]
The most-planted varietals used in madeira are the Tinta Negra Mole and the Complexa grapes, though the traditional Sercial, Bual, Malvasia (Malmsey), and Verdelho grapes, which produce far better-quality Madeira, are making something of a comeback. Modern methods of production—particularly versions of the estufa system, which mimic the effect of the round-trip sea voyages that fell out of use in the early twentieth century—produce cheaper and medium-quality wines, while the best are still allowed to mature naturally in “lodges” for twenty years or more.
As the authors of the Oxford Companion to Wine point out, “Madeira is probably the most robust wine in the world.” There’s practically nothing that can go wrong with it. Indeed, the opposite may even be true: the infamous monk, rake, and orgiast Rasputin, having eaten a plate of cakes, each containing enough cyanide to kill a normal man, was given a glass of even more heavily poisoned madeira; he sipped it like a connoisseur and demanded more, on account of a “slight irritation” in his throat; the second glass seemed to soothe him and he asked his poisoner, Prince Yusupoff, to sing to him. (It took another song, five shots through the heart with a revolver, and his head battered in with a lead-loaded cane before Rasputin finally expired. Do not try this at home.)
Whatever their powers in that case, it is certainly true that the best madeiras are almost immortal themselves and can age in the bottle almost indefinitely. And as a bonus, a bottle of good madeira can last for several months after opening, although we personally have never put it to the test; it seems rather pointless to just leave it there, as the reader will surely agree.
But therein lies our seducer’s fatal error. “Eager to carve one more notch / On the butt of his gold-headed cane,” the cad declares that “once it is open you know it won’t keep.”
“It won’t keep”? Feh. Exposed as a liar—to us, if not to the object of his evil lusts—the roué is defeated. The innocent rushes away down the corridor, his words—“Have some madeira, m’dear”—echoing in her mind:
Until the next morning, she woke up in bed
With a smile on her lips and an ache in her head
And a beard in her ear ‘ole that tickled and said
“Have some madeira, m’dear.”
Did religion save the California wine industry?
FROM ITS VERY beginnings in the seventeenth century, the United States was a hard-drinking country. By the mid-nineteenth century, whether in the towns or out on the prairie, the drunkard stumbling out of the saloon and reeling down the street was a familiar sight. Sentimental poems about children asking their fathers to stop drinking and songs about drink, degradation, and death were widely popular, and slogans on the line of “Drink is the curse of the working man” became a driving theme of societies that were set up to combat the demon rum. Chapters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (founded in 1874) and then the Anti-Saloon League (founded in 1895) sprang up around the country, encouraging individuals to “take the pledge” against drink and lobbying the state legislatures to pass laws turning a state from wet to dry. The various Protestant churches were strong allies of the movement. The goal evolved from temperance to abolition, and immediately after the First World War, this was accomplished: the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, known as the National Prohibition or Volstead Act, became law. Therefore, from January 16, 1920, until December 5, 1933, the commercial production and sale of “intoxicating liquors” was forbidden—and because the definition of an intoxicating liquor was one with an alcohol content of 0.5 percent or higher, wine was caught in the net.
It was the California wine industry, by far the largest in the country, that got hit in the stomach. There were about seven hundred wineries in the state and most of them