CHAPTER XIII.
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.
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.
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.