Winter Wines

For every Wine there is a season. When it's springtime in Vienna, everyone gulps heurige--the lively young light wine--from glass mugs. Even devout wine snobs sip chilled rosé, contentedly, at a summer picnic in the country. Parisians tie into le beaujolais nouveau in the fall, almost before it has finished fermenting. But when arctic winds numb your toes and your soul, nothing does better than the sun-drenched, sonorous, penetrating wines of winter--malmsey, madeira, the big, aged ports and oloroso sherries--wines that warm the cockles and take the chill from the marrow, even when the mercury drops from sight. On their native turf, these winter wines are known as generosos, and they have much in common. Each one is much in common. Each one is uncompromisingly robust, with a rich, unmistakable flavor and aroma. Each is relatively high in alcohol for wine, about 20 percent, being braced with brandy. Fortification with brandy developed from the need to stabilize the wines so they would hold up during long voyages and adverse conditions. All are invested by aficionados with tonic or restorative properties and, with one exception noted farther on, they're unabashedly sweet. However, the sweetness is balanced by nuance and depth of flavor, which keeps the wines from becoming dull. And although they're prized all over the world, all are, to a greater or lesser degree, British contrivances.

The most totally John Bullish--associated with the lavishness and indulgence of the Edwardian era and the dismal English climate--is port. Porto, as its sponsors would have us call it, is a fortified, blended wine made from grapes grown in a part of the valley of the River Douro in northern Portugal.

Most porto is aged in the wood. As the years pass, the wine becomes progressively lighter, drier, smoother and more subtle. The youngest, full or red port, is purplish, sweet, rough, with a noticeable alcoholic bite. In English working-class pubs, it is mixed with lemon soda to make a long port and lemon. With time, a wooded port becomes ruby, light ruby and eventually tawny. Porto from the wood is considered ready to drink when bottled. It should not have a sediment.

The other method of aging porto is in glass, which means, almost inevitably, vintage port. These are the top pressings of a superlative year, blended for style and balance. Wines from only the one year are permitted in a vintage bottling. When the fermented wine "falls bright," it is separated from its sediment and barreled for about two years, then it's bottled and left to mature. Since porto develops twice as fast in wood as in glass, this mysterious process may span decades. Time required will vary with the particular year, the brand--each shipper declares a vintage independently--and personal taste.

Vintage porto, obviously, is not something one swigs on the spur of the moment. Top vintages are the '48s, '50s, '55s, '58s and '60s. The '45s are prime and holding. The highly rated '63s aren't quite ready; if you buy them, be sure they've had tender, loving care on the way to you. The '66s are on the light side and will be drinkable before the '63 vintage. 'Sixty-seven was declared by only a few shippers; '70 is considered promising and can be laid down now for consumption in seven to ten years.

Not all bottle-aged porto is vintage port. Crusted porto is usually a blend of several years, although some shippers use off vintages. Crusteds mature earlier but don't have the depth or complexity of the bona-fide article.

LB, or late-bottled vintage, gets from four to seven years in the cask before bottling. Both harvest and bottling dates should be shown on the label, as with true vintage porto. A late bottling is usually lighter in body and color than a true vintage and is ready to drink sooner. Since it throws a crust, it requires the same careful handling as vintage porto. A porto of the vintage, occasionally called port of the year, or dated port, is something else again. It is a wooded porto, usually an old tawny, with a minimum of seven years--often considerably more--in the cask. The wine is presumably all of a single growing year. Pragmatically, all you expect, or hope for, is that it's all old wine. A porto of the vintage should show harvest and bottling dates. It should not throw any sediment, having been racked repeatedly during its long life and probably filtered before bottling. These wines are quite unlike vintage portos, but they can be exquisite.

Wine lovers are indebted to Portugal for another big boomer, madeira, which comes from the semitropical island of that name. The four major types--sercial, verdelho, bual and malmsey--are supposedly named for the grape varieties from which they're made. And at one time they were. Today, they represent the relative levels of sugar and body, progressing from sercial, the driest, to malmsey, a luscious, richly endowed, occasionally overwhelming winter wine.

Malmsey--pungent, raisiny, delightfully warming--was the favorite wine of Colonial America. Most of the founding fathers were confirmed malmsey hands. Big George himself was reputed to be a two-bottle man and John Adams drank madeira "at a great rate."

What happened to early America's romance with madeira? A succession of vineyard catastrophes, wars and the blight of Prohibition dried up the supply. In recent years, the resourceful people at Sherry-Lehmann Wines and Spirits uncovered a cache of old madeiras and brought it into the country; but even that source is now down to random bottlings. There are said to be aged stocks resting in caves and cellars on Madeira, but a procedural conflict concerning dating is holding up export. Until the impasse between the government of Portugal and U. S. Customs is resolved, we won't be seeing any more of the rare, dated bottles on these shores. However, there's no dearth of good malmsey coming in from reliable houses--Sandeman, Justino, Barbeito, Funchal, Blandy, Shortridge. Leacock and Cossart ship all madeira except malmsey at this time.

A vintage date is one thing you don't want on an oloroso-sherry label or, for that matter, any sherry. If you happen onto a dated sherry, pass it by. It will undoubtedly be a hype. The heart of the sherry process is the Solera, an intricate system of continuous blending and aging that imparts depth and subtlety and makes for an identical product--not just from year to year but for generations.

Despite its deep-amber-to-brown hue, oloroso sherry is made from a white grape, the palomino. The dark color is due partly to oxidation, undesirable in almost all other wines. Unlike ports and the sweeter madeiras, sherry is fermented out. That is, all the sugar in the mosto is converted to alcohol and the wine is completely dry. The casks of new wine are watched anxiously to see which way they go.

Nobody knows why or how it happens, but a lacy veil of yeast, known as the flor del vino, appears on the surface of some wines and not others. A lush growth of flor means that the wine will develop into a light, delicate, tangy fino. Casks with little or no flor will mature as olorosos, Spanish for "the fragrant ones." These rich, nutty wines of great rotundity are the basis for the full-bodied dessert sherries--the creams, milks, the amorosos and East India browns.

Sweetness and color come from the addition of an inky, treacly wine called PX, after the Pedro Ximénez grape, from which it is made. This is more a liqueur than a wine, and in Spain it is treated as such. If you're curious, you can buy a bottle of PX, under the Viña No. 25 label. It's brought in by Pedro Domecq, which markets a line of sherries, including Celebration Cream. Other fine full-bodied sherries available in the United States are Canasta Cream, Santa Maria Cream, Nectar Cream, Armada Cream, Delicate Cream and Golden Cream. But the big gun, despite its hefty price and potent sweetness, is Harvey's Bristol Cream. It's an overwhelming favorite, accounting for better than half of all imported sherry consumed in the U. S., and some devotees don't even know it as a sherry.

Scandinavians go for lusty, sweet sherries--a welcome warmer-upper after a trek on snowshoes. They've also been known to take sweet sherries as an aperitif, with herring. That viking heritage may breed heroes, but not epicures.

In Spain, olorosos are generally dry. The nose is enormous and the wines long on the palate. A splash of an aged dry oloroso in a snifter will give you some inkling of the grandeur that Spanish sherry can attain. It's a shame the type isn't better known here, and the shippers themselves are, to an extent, responsible. They prefer to exploit the evident appeal of the cream sherries, defaulting on drier bottlings. Several dry olorosos do come into the country; notably, Rivero's CZ, Gonzalez Byass' Alfonso and Dos Cortados from Williams & Humbert. Distribution is extremely spotty. Your best bet may be a special order placed with a good liquor shop.

Ports and sherries produced in the U. S. must so indicate on the label. They are often good as wines but do not mirror the distinctive traits of their prototypes, the finesse of fine aged porto, the depth and nuttiness of sherries from Spain. American ports are generally in the ruby style, the cream sherries often closer to madeira than the Spanish product. Most would benefit from more aging--and some are beginning to get it. The Christian Brothers and Paul Masson do a creditable job in both categories. Sebastiani, Llords & Elwood, Cresta Blanca and Widmer put out good cream sherries. Ficklin's tinta port is conceded to be the class of the ports, justifiably. David Ficklin has long used a large percentage of Portuguese grape varieties in his crush; now he's been joined by others. American ports and sherries are particularly appropriate for making cheering winter hot drinks.

Château d'Yquem and the legendary tokaji essencia are just too elegant to be classified as winter wines. But tokaji, or tokay, aszu, essencia's cousin, definitely belongs. It's a lovely, luscious, honeyed wine--completely unrelated to the undistinguished tokay wines of California. Overripe furmint grapes, gathered as late as December in a good year, are deposited in wooden tubs called puttonyos. The nectar squeezed out by the pressure of the grapes on one another is taken off for essencia. The grapes are then trodden into a pulp. This mush is added to juice pressed from normally ripe grapes and fermented. Quality and price are determined by the number of puttonyos of grape pulp that have been added. The label on a bottle of tokaji aszu will always show the number of puttonyos. Four or five putts is a high proportion. Six putts seem to be the ceiling, though none is available right now. Tokaji aszu is one of the few winter wines that are not fortified. Because of its high sugar content, however, it is 14 to 15 percent alcohol.

Southern Italy and Sicily are prime sources of robust winter wines. Among them are the muscat-scented malvasia di lipari, passito--reminiscent of Spain's PX and marsala--sometimes all' uovo, "with egg," or flavored with almond, strawberry, banana, even chocolate. Marsala vergine, one of the finest, is made by the Solera method. Spain sends strong, grapy, dark malaga. Greece is represented by sweet, red mavrodaphne, which is sometimes called Hellenic port. Muscats come from almost every vineyard area. One of the more memorable is the intensely aromatic, golden-brown muscatel of Setubal, from a vineyard area 20 miles southeast of Lisbon.

Winter wines may be, and often are, served with or after the dessert at formal dinners. They're complementary to many cheeses, fresh fruits, berries, nuts, cookies and sweet crackers, fruit tarts, fruitcake, poundcake, poached fruit, crèmes and custards. But unlike most other wines, they are superb taken alone--without any outside sensory distractions. Winter wines are wonderfully comforting any time dank, dreary, bone-chilling weather gets you down. (More reliable than a trip to the West Indies: Who knows? It might rain.) They're delightful wines for sipping before a snapping fire, after a shoot or a day zipping down a ski run. Not bad for kindling a budding relationship, either. To present them in meager, thimble-size glasses, as some do, is almost a barbarity. They're beautifully fragrant, lavishly endowed wines. To get the most of what they have to offer, pour them into clear, generous-sized wineglasses. Admire the color, breathe deeply of the seductive incense, sip the glorious nectar ... and you'll be hoping that winter hangs on forever.