Spanish Wines--Spanish Indifference--Wine-making--Vins du
Pays--Local Wines--Benicarló--Valdepeñas.
The wines of Spain deserve a chapter to themselves. Sherry indeed is not
less popular among us than Murillo, in spite of the numbers of bad
copies of the one, which are passed off for undoubted originals, and
butts of the other, which are sold neat as imported. The Spaniard
himself is neither curious in port, nor particular in Madeira; he
prefers quantity to quality, and loves flavour much less than he hates
trouble; a cellar in a private house, of rare fine or foreign wines, is
perhaps a greater curiosity than a library of ditto books; an hidalgo
with twenty names simply sends out before his frugal meal for a quart of
wine to the nearest shop, as a small burgess does in the City for a pint
of porter. Local in every thing, the Spaniard takes the goods that the
gods provide him, just as they come to hand; he drinks the wine that
grows in the nearest vineyards, and if there are none, then regales
himself with the water from the least distant spring. It is so in
everything; he adds the smallest possible exertion of his own to the
bounties of nature; his object is to obtain the largest produce for the
smallest labour; he allows a life-conferring sun and a fertile soil to
create for him the raw material, which he exports, being perfectly
contented that the foreigner should return it to him when recreated by
art and industry; thus his wool, barilla, hides, and cork-bark, are
imported by him back again in the form of cloth, glass, leather, and
bungs.
[Sidenote: WINES OF SPAIN.]
The most celebrated and perfect wines of the Peninsula are port and
sherry, which owe their excellence to foreign, not to native skill, the
principal growers and makers being Europeans, and their system
altogether un-Spanish; nothing can be more rude, antique, and
unscientific, than the wine-making in those localities where no
stranger has ever settled. But Spain is a land bottled up for
antiquarians, and it must be confessed that the national process is very
picturesque and classical; no Ariadne revel of Titian is more glittering
or animated, no bas-relief more classical in which sacrifices are
celebrated
“To Bacchus, who first from out the purple grape
Crushed the sweet poison of misused wine.”
Often have we ridden through villages redolent with vinous aroma, and
inundated with the blood of the berry, until the very mud was
encarnadined; what a busy scene! Donkeys laden with panniers of the ripe
fruit, damsels bending under heavy baskets, men with reddened legs and
arms, joyous and jovial as satyrs, hurry jostling on to the rude and
dirty vat, into which the fruit is thrown indiscriminately, the
black-coloured with the white ones, the ripe bunches with the sour, the
sound berries with those decayed; no pains are taken, no selection is
made; the filth and negligence are commensurate with this carelessness;
the husks are either trampled under naked feet or pressed out under a
rude beam; in both cases every refining operation is left to the
fermentation of nature, for there is a divinity that shapes our ends,
rough hew them how we may.
[Sidenote: VALDEPENAS.]
The wines of Spain, under a latitude where a fine season is a certainty,
might rival those of France, and still more those of the Rhine, where a
good vintage is the exception, not the rule. Their varieties are
infinite, since few districts, unless those that are very elevated, are
without their local produce, the names, colours, and flavours of which
are equally numerous and varied. The thirsty traveller, after a long
day’s ride under a burning sun, when seated quietly down to a smoking
peppery dish, is enchanted with the cool draught of these vins du pays,
which are brought fresh to him from the skins or amphora jars; he longs
to transport the apparently divine nectar to his own home, and wonders
that “the trade” should have overlooked such delicious wine. Those who
have tried the experiment will find a sad change for the worse come over
the spirit of their dream, when the long-expected importation greets
their papillatory organs in London. There the illusion is dispelled;
there to a cloyed fastidious taste, to a judgment bewildered and
frittered away by variety of the best vintages, how flat, stale, and
unprofitable does this much-fancied beverage appear! The truth is, that
its merit consists in the thirst and drinking vein of the traveller,
rather than in the wine itself. Those therefore of our readers whose
cellars are only stocked with choice Bordeaux, Xerez, and Champagne, may
sustain with resignation the absence of other sorts of Spanish grape
juice. If an exception is to be made, let it be only in favour of
Valdepeñas and Manzanilla.
The local wines may therefore be tossed off rapidly. The Navarrese drink
their Peralta, the Basques their Chacolet, which is a poor vin ordinaire
and inferior to our good cider. The Arragonese are supplied from the
vineyards of Cariñena; the Catalans, from those of Sidges and Benicarló;
the former is a rich sweet wine, with a peculiar aromatic flavour; the
latter is the well-known black strap, which is exported largely to
Bordeaux to enrich clarets for our vitiated taste, and as it is rich
red, and full flavoured, much comes to England to concoct what is
denominated curious old port by those who sell it. The fiery and acrid
brandy which is made from this Benicarló is sent to the bay of Cadiz to
the tune of 1000 butts a year to doctor up worse sherry.
The central provinces of Spain consume but little of these; Leon has a
wine of its own which grows chiefly near Zamora and Toro, and it is much
drunk at the neighbouring and learned university of Salamanca, where, as
it is strong and heady, it promotes prejudice, as port is said to do
elsewhere. Madrid is supplied with wines grown at Tarancon, Arganda, and
other places in its immediate vicinity, and those of the latter are
frequently substituted for the celebrated Valdepeñas of La Mancha, which
was mother’s milk to Sancho Panza and his two eminent progenitors; they
differed, as their worthy descendant informed the Knight of the Wood, on
the merits of a cask; one of them just dipped his tongue into the wine,
and affirmed that it had a taste of iron; the other merely applied his
nose to the bung-hole, and was positive that it smacked of leather; in
due time when the barrel was emptied, a key tied to a thong confirmed
the degustatory acumen of these connoisseurs.
[Sidenote: THE BEST VINEYARDS.]
The red blood of this “valley of stones” issues with such abundance,
that quantities of old wine are often thrown away, for the want of
skins, jars, and casks into which to place the new. From the scarcity
of fuel in these denuded plains, the prunings of the vine are sometimes
as valuable as the grapes. Even at Valdepeñas, with Madrid for its
customer, the wine continues to be made in an unscientific, careless
manner. Before the French invasion, a Dutchman, named Muller, had begun
to improve the system, and better prices were obtained; whereupon the
lower classes, in 1808, broke open his cellars, pillaged them, and
nearly killed him because he made wine dearer. It is made of a Burgundy
grape which has been transplanted and transported from the stinted suns
of fickle France, to the certain and glorious summers of La Mancha. The
genuine wine is rich, full-bodied, and high-coloured. It will keep
pretty well, and improves for four or five years, nay, longer. To be
really enjoyed it must be drunk on the spot; the curious in wine should
go down into one of the _cuevas_ or cave-cellars, and have a goblet of
the ruby fluid drawn from the big-bellied jar. The wine, when taken to
distant places, is almost always adulterated; and at Madrid with a
decoction of log wood, which makes it almost poisonous, acting upon the
nerves and muscular system.
The best vineyards and _bodegas_ or cellars are those which did belong
to Don Carlos, and those which do belong to the Marques de Santa Cruz.
One anecdote will do the work of pages in setting forth the habitual
indifference of Spaniards, and the way things are managed for them. This
very nobleman, who certainly was one of the most distinguished among the
grandees in rank and talent, was dining one day with a foreign
ambassador at Madrid, who was a decided admirer of Valdepeñas, as all
judicious men must be, and who took great pains to procure it quite pure
by sending down trusty persons and sound casks. The Marques at the first
glass exclaimed, “What capital wine! where do you manage to buy it in
Madrid?” “I send for it,” was the reply, “to your _administrador_ at
Valdepeñas, Anglice unjust steward, and shall be very happy to get you
some.”
[Sidenote: VALDEPENAS.]
The wine is worth on the spot about 5_l._ the pipe, but the land
carriage is expensive, and it is apt, when conveyed in skins, to be
tapped and watered by the muleteers, besides imbibing the disagreeable
smack of the pitched pigskin. The only way to secure a pure,
unadulterated, legitimate article, is to send up _double_ quarter sherry
casks; the wine is then put into one, and that again is protected by an
outer cask, which acts as a preventive guard, against gimlets, straws,
and other ingenious contrivances for extracting the vinous contents, and
for introducing an aqueous substitute. It must then be conveyed either
on mules or in waggons to Cadiz and Santander. It is always as well to
send for two casks, as _accidents_ in this _pays de l’imprévu_
constantly happen where wine and women are in the case. The importer
will receive the most satisfactory certificates signed and sealed on
paper, first duly stamped, in which the alcalde, the muleteer, the
guardia, and all who have shared in the booty, will minutely describe
and prove the _accident_, be it an upset, a breaking of casks, or what
not. Very little pure Valdepeñas ever reaches England; the numerous
vendors’ bold assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. As sherry is a
subject of more general interest, it will be treated with somewhat more
detail.
[Sidenote: SHERRY.]