ephlis01 SUMMER/FALL 2001 (THE LOST ISSUE): Part 9
Page 11: Sherry (Pegasus font):
SHERRY
I found a little hotel but in contrast to that in the New World it was spruce, recently built, a torre or villa like a white Surrey “residence,” surrounded by other villas of a similar kind. A suburban pension, in fact, with English and German guests, an unlikely place in which to find any good wine at all. But the proprietor, a little man with a ready smile named Orriols, had real knowledge and taste and a remarkable stock. He loved to talk, and his two favourite subjects were wine and bull-fighters and I learned about both from him.
I can see the tiled hall of that house very vividly. Under the stairs in the cushioned armchair would sit for most of each day an old porcelain-faced Marquesa, whose black dress and shining silver hair looked very decorative against the white walls. When I came in at night after writing all day in the house opposite, where I lived, I would put a record on the gramophone and dance with Anita the hotel book-keeper, while Marquesa smiled and knitted. Then Orriols would say—“I want you to try another Fino this evening, I’ve put a half a bottle on ice” and we would sit and drink from generous glasses, our nostrils filled with the delicious scent of the wine in which the winds of Andalucia, coming across the sea and saltmarshes, or bare hills and rough pastures, seemed to be perceptible still, as though they had been caught and bottled.
“When your Prince of Wales went to Jerez,” I remembered Orriols telling me, “he was shown the bodegas and given some of a very precious wine. An old man who had worked in that bodega all his life filled the Prince’s glass and handed it to him, but when he saw that the Prince was just going to swallow it, as though it were just any wine, he could contain himself no longer. He snatched the glass back and said, ‘No, Alteza, that’s not the way to drink this wine. You pass it under your nose first, like this...’ And he went through all the rigmarole of tasting Sherry. Your Prince of Wales took it very well and drank as he was told.”
From Sherry, by Rupert Croft-Cooke (1955)
