The sherry industry always used to admit that 75 per cent of its UK sales occurred in the weeks before Christmas. A large proportion of this was to teetotallers, who needed something to offer the family, or the vicar, or Father Christmas, or whoever happened to drop by over the holidays and was in need of what my late lamented nanny used to call ‘Festive Cheer’. The great advantage of a bottle of sherry was that, after the guests had departed and there was something left in the bottle, it wouldn’t turn to vinegar as rapidly as the remains of a bottle of wine.
That’s the point about fortified wines. That’s why they were invented in the first place. Not simply to be, in the words of Flanders and Swann, ‘a liquor/ that will get you higher, quicker’, but to slow down oxidisation.
John Aubrey wrote in his diary of 1697 (coincidentally the year before my company of Berry Bros & Rudd was founded) how he added salt to his claret to make it taste nicer.
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