1876 Facts About Sherry by Henry Vizetelly

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Facts about Sherry.

and,so far as wine is concerned, a kind of rival to the great sheiTy metropolis, just as centuries ago it was more than the rival of Cadiz as a port. The palaces raised by its merchant princes ofbygone times, and to-day converted to ignoble uses, are in a sadly dilapidated condition. Their richly-carved door ways are crumbling away; their proud scutcheons are well-nigh obliterated; their marble patios — those elegant arcaded courts of Moorish origin and design with sculptured fountains in the centre—are going rapidly to ruin. An occasional small passenger steamer, some scores of fishing boats, and a few lighters are the only craft that now enter the ample harbour of Puerto de Santa Maria, which a still-existing Moorish castle once defended. Indeed,the Puerto does not even ship its own wine direct, but sends it in barges to the Trocadero mole, some four or five miles distant. The wines ofthe Puerto are in every respect the counterpart of those of Jerez, excepting that they are,in a measure,inferior to the finer varieties of the more renowned viticultural district, owing to the best soils being of scarcely the same favourable character. G-enerally speaking,they are from the same species. of grape, are made in exactly the same manner,while their after- treatment is in all respects precisely similar. Indeed, the most experienced judge would fail to detect any difference between the ordinary produce of the respective districts. The oldest shipping house at the Puerto de Santa Maria is the well-known one of Duff Gordon and Co., whose bodegas are reached through a. charming garden court, bordered with handsome flowering shrubs and with clusters of fine old trees towering in the centre. Geraniums in all their splendour, with ivy and other climbing plants, are trained up the walls, hiding all but the entrances to the cellars. Of these the spacious shipping bodega,remarkable for its wide passages between the several rows of casks all posed in perfectly straight lines, and exactly level one with another—contains 3,000 butts of various kinds of sherry wine. Pour other bodegas are devoted to soleras comprising some singularly delicate fines ten years old, with amontiUados of