Gatherings From Spain

That Capataz has attained the object of his fondest wishes, who has observed in his compositions the poetical principles of Horace, the callida junctura, the omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci; this happy and skilful junction of the sweet and solid, should unite fulness of body, an oily, nutty flavour and bouquet, dryness, absence from acidity, strength, durability, and spirituosity. Very little brandy is necessary, as the vivifying power of the unstinted sun of Andalucia imparts sufficient alcohol, which ranges from 20 to 23 per cent. in fine sherries, and only reaches about 12 in clarets and champagnes. Fine pure sherry is of a rich brown colour, but in order to flatter the conventional tastes of some English, “pale old sherry” must be had, and colour is chemically discharged at the expense of delicate aroma. Another absurd deference to British prejudice, is the sending sherries to the East Indies, because such a trip is found sometimes to benefit the wines of Madeira. This is not only expensive but positively injurious to the juice of Xerez, as the wine returns diminished in quantity, turbid, sharp, and deteriorated in flavour, while from the constant fermentation it becomes thinner in body and more spirituous. The real secret of procuring good sherry is to pay the best price for it at the best house, and then to keep the purchase for many years in a good cellar before it is drunk.

WINE IN CASK

To return to the Capataz. This head master passes this life of probation in tasting. He goes the regular round of his butts, ascertaining the qualities, merits, and demerits of each pupil, which he notes by certain marks or hieroglyphics. He corrects faults as he goes along, making a memorandum also of the date and remedy applied, and thus at his next visit he is enabled to report good progress, or lament the contrary. The new wines, after the fermentation is past, are commonly enriched with an arrope, or sort of syrup, which is found very much to encourage them. There are extensive manufactories of this cordial at San Lucar, and wherever the arenas, or sandy soil, prevails. The must, or new grape juice, before fermentation has commenced, is boiled slowly down to the fifth of its bulk. It must simmer, and requires great care in the skimming and not being burnt. Of this, when dissolved, the vino de color, the madre vino, or mother wine, is made, by which the younger ones are nourished as by mother’s milk. When old, this balsamic ingredient becomes strong, perfumed as an essence, and very precious, and is worth from three to five hundred guineas a butt; indeed it scarcely ever will be sold at all. All the principal bodegas have certain huge and time-honoured casks which contain this divine ichor, which inspires ordinary wines with generous and heroic virtues; hence possibly their dedication of their tuns not to saints and saintesses, but to Wellingtons and Nelsons. It is from these reservoirs that distinguished visitors are allowed just a sip. Such a compliment was paid to Ferdinand VII. by Pedro Domecq, and the cask to this day bears the royal name of its assayer. Whatever quantity is taken out of one of these for the benefit of younger wines, is replaced by a similar quantity drawn from the next oldest cask in the cellar.

TASTING WINE

After a year or two trial of the new wines, it is ascertained how they will eventually turn out; if they go wrong, they are expelled from the seminary, and shipped off to the leathern-tongued consumers of Hamburgh or Quebec, at about 15l. per butt. All the various forms, stages, and steps of education are readily explained in the great establishments, among which the first are those of Domecq and John David Gordon, and nothing can exceed the cordial hospitality of these princely merchants; whoever comes provided with a letter of introduction is carried off bodily, bags, baggage, and all, to their houses, which, considering the iniquity of Xerezan inns, is a satisfactory move. Then and there the guest is initiated into the secrets of trade, and is handed over to the Capataz, who delivers an explanatory lecture on vinology, which is illustrated, like those of Faraday, by experiments: tasting sherry at Xerez has, as Señor Clemente would say, very little in common with the commonplace customs of the London Docks. Here the swarthy professor, dressed somewhat like Figaro in the Barber of Seville, is followed by sundry jacketed and sandalled Ganymedes, who bear glasses on waiters; the lecturer is armed with a long stick, to the end of which is tied a bit of hollow cane, which he dips into each butt; the subject is begun at the beginning, and each step in advance is explained to the listening party with the gravity of a judicious foreman of a jury: the sample is handed round and tasted by all, who, if they are wise, will follow the example of their leader (on whom wine has no more effect than on a glass), by never swallowing the sips, but only permitting the tongue to agitate it in the mouth, until the exact flavour is mastered; every cask is tried, from the young wine to the middle-aged, from the mature to the golden ancient. Those who are not stupefied by the fumes, cannot fail to come out vastly edified. The student should hold hard during the first trials, for the best wine is reserved until the last. He ascends, if he does not tumble off, a vinous ladder of excellence. It would be better to reverse the order of the course, and commence with the finest sorts while the palate is fresh and the judgment unclouded. The thirster after knowledge must not drink too deeply now, but remember the second ordeal to which he will afterwards be exposed at the hospitable table of the proprietor, whose joy and pride is to produce fine wine and plenty of it, when his friends meet around his mahogany.

What a grateful offering is then made to the jovial god, by whom the merchant lives, and by whom the deity is now set from his glassy prison free! What a drawing of popping corks, half consumed by time! – what a brushing away of venerable cobwebs from flasks binned apart while George the Third was king! The delight of the worthy Amphitryon on producing a fresh bottle, exceeds that of a prolific mother when she blesses her husband with a new baby. He handles the darling decanter, as if he dearly loved the contents, which indeed are of his own making; how the clean glasses are held up to the light to see the bright transparent liquid sparkle and phosphoresce within; how the intelligent nose is passed slowly over the mantling surface, redolent with fragrancy; how the climax of rapture is reached when the god-like nectar is raised to the blushing lips!

PRICES OF SHERRY

The wine suffices in itself for sensual gratification and for intellectual conversation: all the guests have an opinion; what gentleman, indeed, cannot judge on a horse or a bottle? When differences arise, as they will in matters of taste, and where bottles circulate freely, the master-host decides—

“Tells all the names, lays down the law,Que ça est bon; ah, goûtez ça.”

There is to him a combination of pleasure and profit in these genial banquets, these noctes cœnæque Deum. Many a good connection is thus formed, when an English gentleman, who now, perhaps for the first time, tastes pure and genuine sherry. A good dinner naturally promotes good humour with mankind in general, and with the donor in particular. A given quantity of the present god opens both heart and purse-strings, until the tongue on which the magic flavour lingers, murmurs gratefully out, “Send me a butt of amantillado pasado, and another of seco reanejo, and draw for the cash at sight.”

An important point will now arise, what is the price? That ever is the question and the rub. Pure genuine sherry, from ten to twelve years old, is worth from 50 to 80 guineas per butt, in the bodega, and when freight, insurance, duty, and charges are added, will stand the importer from 100 to 130 guineas in his cellar. A butt will run from 108 to 112 gallons, and the duty is 5s. 6d. per gallon. Such a butt will bottle about 52 dozen. The reader will now appreciate the bargains of those “pale” and “golden sherries” advertised in the English newspapers at 36s. the dozen, bottles included. They are maris expers, although much indebted to French brandy, Sicilian Marsala, Cape wine, Devonshire cider, and Thames water.

ADULTERATION OF WINES

The growth of wine amounts to some 400,000 or 500,000 arrobas annually. The arroba is a Moorish name, and a dry measure, although used for liquids; it contains a quarter of a hundredweight; 30 arrobas go to a bota, or butt, of which from 8000 to 10,000 of really fine are annually exported: but the quantities of so-called sherries, “neat as imported,” in the manufacture of which San Lucar is fully occupied, is prodigious, and is increasing every year. To give an idea of the extent of the growing traffic, in 1842 25,096 butts were exported from these districts, and 29,313 in 1843; while in 1845 there were exported 18,135 butts from Xerez alone, and 14,037 from the Puerto, making the enormous aggregate of 32,172 butts. Now as the vineyards remain precisely the same, probably some portion of these additional barrels may not be quite the genuine produce of the Xerez grape: in truth, the ruin of sherry wines has commenced, from the numbers of second-rate houses that have sprung up, which look to quantity, not quality. Many thousand butts of bad Niebla wine are thus palmed off on the enlightened British public after being well brandied and doctored; thus a conventional notion of sherry is formed, to the ruin of the real thing; for even respectable houses are forced to fabricate their wines so as to suit the depraved taste of their consumers, as is done with pure clarets at Bordeaux, which are charged with Hermitages and Benicarló. Thus delicate idiosyncratic flavour is lost, while headache and dyspepsia are imported; but there is a fashion in wines as in physicians. Formerly Madeira was the vinous panacea, until the increased demand induced disreputable traders to deteriorate the article, which in the reaction became dishonoured. Then sherry was resorted to as a more honest and wholesome beverage. Now its period of decline is hastening from the same causes, and the average produce is becoming inferior, to end in disrepute, and possibly in a return to the wines of Madeira, whose makers have learnt a lesson in the stern school of adversity.

MANZANILLA

Be that as it may, the people at large of Spain are scarcely acquainted with the taste of sherry wine, beyond the immediate vicinity in which it is made; and more of it is swallowed at Gibraltar at the messes, than in either Madrid, Toledo, or Salamanca. Sherry is a foreign wine, and made and drunk by foreigners; nor do the generality of Spaniards like its strong flavour, and still less its high price, although some now affect its use, because, from its great vogue in England, it argues civilization to adopt it. This use obtains only in the capital and richer seaports; thus at inland Granada, not 150 miles from Xerez, sherry would hardly be to be had, were it not for the demand created by our travelling countrymen, and even then it is sold per bottle, and as a liqueur. At Seville, which is quite close to Xerez, in the best houses, one glass only is handed round, just as only one glass of Greek wine was in the house of the father of even Lucullus among the ancient Romans, or as among the modern ones is still done with Malaga or Vino de Cypro; this single glass is drunk as a chasse, and being considered to aid digestion, is called the golpe medico, the coup de médecin; it is equivalent, in that hot country, to the thimbleful of Curaçoa or Cognac, by which coffee is wound up in colder England and France.

In Andalucia it was no less easy for the Moor to encourage the use of water as a beverage, than to prohibit that of wine, which, if endued with strength, which sherry is, must destroy health when taken largely and habitually, as is occasionally found out at Gibraltar. Hence the natives of Xerez themselves infinitely prefer a light wine called Manzanilla, which is made near San Lucar, and is at once much weaker and cheaper than sherry. The grape from whence it is produced grows on a poor and sandy soil. The vintage is very early, as the fruit is gathered before it is quite ripe. The wine is of a delicate pale straw colour, and is extremely wholesome; it strengthens the stomach, without heating or inebriating, like sherry. All classes are passionately fond of it, since the want of alcohol enables them to drink more of it than of stronger beverages, while the dry quality acts as a tonic during the relaxing heats. It may be compared to the ancient Lesbian, which Horace quaffed so plentifully in the cool shade, and then described as never doing harm. The men employed in the sherry wine vaults, and who have therefore that drink at their command, seldom touch it, but invariably, when their work is done, go to the neighbouring shop to refresh themselves with a glass of “innocent” Manzanilla. Among their betters, clubs are formed solely to drink it, and with iced water and a cigar it transports the consumer into a Moslem’s dream of paradise. It tastes better from the cask than out of the bottle, and improves as the cask gets low.

THE ALPISTERA

The origin of the name has been disputed; some who prefer sound to sense derive it from Manzana, an apple, which had it been cider might have passed; others connect it with the distant town of Mansanilla on the opposite side of the river, where it is neither made nor drunk. The real etymology is to be found in its striking resemblance to the bitter flavour of the flowers of camomile (manzanilla), which are used by our doctors to make a medicinal tea, and by those of Spain for fomentations. This flavour in the wine is so marked as to be at first quite disagreeable to strangers. If its eulogistic consumers are to be believed, the wine surpasses the tea in hygæian qualities: none, say they, who drink it are ever troubled with gravel, stone, or gout. Certainly, it is eminently free from acidity. The very best Manzanilla is to be had in London of Messrs. Gorman, No. 16, Mark Lane. Since “Drink it, ye dyspeptics,” was enjoined last year in the ‘Handbook,’ the importation of this wine to England, which previously did not exceed ten butts, has in twelve short months overpassed two hundred; a compliment delicate as it is practical, which is acknowledged by the author – a drinker thereof – with most profound gratitude.

By the way, the real thing to eat with Manzanilla is the alpistera. Make it thus: – To one pound of fine flour (mind that it is dry) add half a pound of double-refined, well-sifted, pounded white sugar, the yolks and whites of four very fresh eggs, well beaten together; work the mixture up into a paste; roll it out very thin; divide it into squares about half the size of this page; cut it into strips, so that the paste should look like a hand with fingers; then dislocate the strips, and dip them in hot melted fine lard, until of a delicate pale brown; the more the strips are curled up and twisted the better; the alpistera should look like bunches of ribbons; powder them over with fine white sugar. They are then as pretty as nice. It is not easy to make them well; but the gods grant no excellence to mortals without much labour and thought. So Venus the goddess of grace was allied to hard-working Vulcan, who toiled and pondered at his fire, as every cook who has an aspiring soul has ever done.

SPANISH INNS

CHAPTER XV

Spanish Inns: Why so Indifferent – The Fonda – Modern Improvements – The Posada – Spanish Innkeepers – The Venta: Arrival in it – Arrangement – Garlic – Dinner – Evening – Night – Bill – Identity with the Inns of the Ancients.

INNS – WHY SO INDIFFERENT

HAVING thus, and we hope satisfactorily, discussed the eatables and drinkables of Spain, attention must naturally be next directed to those houses on the roads and in the towns, where these comforts to the hungry and weary public are to be had, or are not to be had, as sometimes will happen in this land of “the unexpected;” the Peninsular inns, with few exceptions, have long been divided into the bad, the worse, and the worst; and as the latter are still the most numerous and national, as well as the worst, they will be gone into the last. In few countries will the rambler agree oftener with dear Dr. Johnson’s speech to his squire Boswell, “Sir, there is nothing which has been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced, as by a good tavern.” Spain offers many negative arguments of the truth of our great moralist and eater’s reflection; the inns in general are fuller of entertainment for the mind than the body, and even when the newest, and the best in the country, are indifferent if compared to those which Englishmen are accustomed to at home, and have created on those high roads of the Continent, which they most frequent. Here few gentlemen will say with Falstaff, “Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?” Badness of roads and discomforts of ventas cannot well escape the notice of those who travel on horseback and slowly, since they must dwell on and in them; whereas a rail whisks the passenger past such nuisances, with comet-like rapidity, and all things that are soon out of sight are quicker out of mind; nevertheless, let no aspiring writer be deterred from quitting the highways for the byeways of the Peninsula. “There is, Sir,” as Johnson again said to Boswell, “a good deal of Spain that has not been perambulated. I would have you go thither; a man of inferior talents to yours, may furnish us with useful observations on that country.”

CONTINENTAL INNS

Why the public accommodations should be second-rate is soon explained. Nature and the natives have long combined to isolate still more their Peninsula, which already is moated round by the unsocial sea, and is barricadoed by almost impassable mountains. The Inquisition all but reduced Spanish man to the condition of a monk in a wall-enclosed convent, by standing sentinel, and keeping watch and ward against the foreigner and his perilous novelties;7 Spain thus unvisited and unvisiting, became arranged for Spaniards only, and has scarcely required conveniences which are more suited to the curious wants of other Europeans and strangers who here are neither liked, wished for, nor even thought of, by natives who seldom travel except on compulsion and never for amusement; why indeed should they? since Spain is paradise, and each man’s own parish in his eyes is the central spot of its glory. When the noble and rich visited the provinces, they were lodged in their own or in their friends’ houses, just as the clergy and monks were received into convents. The great bulk of the Peninsular family, not being overburdened with cash or fastidiousness, have long been and are inured to infinite inconveniences and negations; they live at home in an abundance of privations, and expect when abroad to be worse off; and they well know that comfort never lodges at a Spanish inn; as in the East, they cannot conceive that any travelling should be unattended by hardships, which they endure with Oriental resignation, as cosas de España, or things of Spain which have always been so, and for which there is no remedy but patient resignation; the bliss of ignorance, and the not knowing of anything better, is everywhere the grand secret of absence of discontent; while to those whose every-day life is a feast, every thing that does not come up to their conventional ideas becomes a failure, but to those whose daily bread is dry and scanty, whose drink is water, every thing beyond prison-fare appears to be luxury.

In Spain there has been little demand for those accommodations which have been introduced on the continent by our nomade countrymen, who carry their tea, towels, carpets, comforts and civilization with them; to travel at all for mere pleasure is quite a modern invention, and being an expensive affair, is the most indulged in by the English, because they can best afford it, but as Spain lies out of their hackneyed routes, the inns still retain much of the same state of primitive dirt and discomfort, which most of those on the continent presented, until repolished by our hints and guineas.

THE FONDA

In the Peninsula, where intellect does not post in a Britannic britzcka and four, the inns, and especially those of the country and inferior order, continue much as they were in the time of the Romans, and probably long before them; nay those in the very vicinity of Madrid, “the only court on earth,” are as classically wretched, as the hostelry at Aricia, near the Eternal City, was in the days of Horace. The Spanish inns, indeed, on the bye-roads and remoter districts, are such as render it almost unadvisable for any English lady to venture to face them, unless predetermined to go through roughing-it, in a way of which none who have only travelled in England can form the remotest idea: at the same time they may be and have been endured by even the sick and delicate. To youth, and to all men in enjoyment of good health, temper, patience, and the blessing of foresight, neither a dinner nor a bed will ever be wanting, to both of which hunger and fatigue will give a zest beyond the reach of art; and fortunately for travellers, all the Continent over, and particularly in Spain, bread and salt, as in the days of Horace, will be found to appease the wayfarer’s barking stomach, nor will he who after that sleeps soundly be bitten by fleas, “quien duerme bien, no le pican las pulgas.” The pleasures of travelling in this wild land are cheaply purchased by these trifling inconveniences, which may always be much lessened by provision in brain and basket; the expeditions team with incident, adventure, and novelty; every day and evening present a comedy of real life, and offer means of obtaining insight into human nature, and form in after-life a perpetual fund of interesting recollections: all that was charming will be then remembered, and the disagreeable, if not forgotten, will be disarmed of its sting, nay, even as having been in a battle, will become a pleasant thing to recollect and to talk, may be twaddle, about. Let not the traveller expect to find too much; if he reckons on finding nothing he will seldom be disappointed; so let him not look for five feet in a cat, “no busces cinco pies al gato.” Spain, as the East, is not to be enjoyed by the over-fastidious in the fleshly comforts: there, those who over analyze, who peep too much behind the culinary or domestic curtains, must not expect to pass a tranquil existence.

THE FONDA

First and foremost among these refuges for the destitute comes the fonda, the hotel. This, as the name implies, is a foreign thing, and was imported from Venice, which in its time was the Paris of Europe, the leader of sensual civilization, and the sink of every lie and iniquity. Its fondacco, in the same manner, served as a model for the Turkish fondack. The fonda is only to be found in the largest towns and principal seaports, where the presence of foreigners creates a demand and supports the establishment. To it frequently is attached a café, or “botilleriá,” a bottlery and a place for the sale of liqueurs, with a “neveria,” a snowery where ices and cakes are supplied. Men only, not horses, are taken in at a fonda; but there is generally a keeper of a stable or of a minor inn in the vicinity, to which the traveller’s animals are consigned. The fonda is tolerably furnished in reference to the common articles with which the sober unindulgent natives are contented: the traveller in his comparisons must never forget that Spain is not England, which too few ever can get out of their heads. Spain is Spain, a truism which cannot be too often repeated; and in its being Spain consists its originality, its raciness, its novelty, its idiosyncrasy, its best charm and interest, although the natives do not know it, and are every day, by a foolish aping of European civilization, paring away attractions, and getting commonplace, unlike themselves, and still more unlike their Gotho-Moro and most picturesque fathers and mothers. Monks, as we said in our preface, are gone, mantillas are going, the shadow of cotton versus corn has already darkened the sunny city of Figaro, and the end of all Spanish things is coming. Ay! de mi España!