Wines with a masculine character: “real colonels” drink port, and politicians like sherry
Wines with a masculine character.
It turns out that wine can and should be chosen in accordance with gender and temperament. Psychologists, for example, argue that extroverted men who love to party during a noisy feast prefer port-like wines.
This opinion, by the way, is confirmed by the fact that in the days of the hussars, the broad-shouldered bottles of aged port wine were not uncorked by their dashing connoisseurs with a corkscrew, but cut off the long neck with a special device, prudently heated over a fire.
People with character do not for nothing prefer port, because this wine is similar to them. In the homeland of Port wine, in Portugal, this drink is aged in oak barrels for 8-12 years, because after this period the wine fully shows all its best qualities. And especially temperamental ports are born during the years of great harvests, which, as the winemakers noticed, simultaneously with the appearance of Halley’s comet.
The last Russian emperor Nikolai Alexandrovich (Nicholas II) also preferred port wine. The tsar passed a sip or two of tonic Crimean port under a piglet with a crispy crust under horseradish.
Sherry can be considered the antipode of port. This drink is usually given due to introverts, people inclined to contemplation and meditation, strategists. In a word, politicians.
After the successful campaign of conquest by the king of Castile and Leon, Alphonse X the Wise (1221-1284), the Spanish sherry was awarded the deserved attention of the heads of state. It was he who conquered the city of Jerez, located in the southern part of Andalusia, from the Arabs, and gave it its modern name Jerez de la Frontera. It was this monarch who raised Spanish winemaking to a new quality level.
Such enlightened views of a medieval politician are explained in the most banal way. King Alphonse the Wise, was seriously ill, and for a long time none of the doctors could help him. Finally, a sage doctor was found who advised the king on a diet, according to which one should eat food in small portions and wash it down with several sips of wine. The diet has paid off. Alphonse soon recovered. Another politician who became addicted to the unique sherry taste is the son of William the Conqueror, Henry I, nicknamed Beauclerc for his scholarship. And the British were the most unprincipled in their thirst for sherry. In 1587, the most important Spanish port of Cadiz was attacked by Francis Drake’s fleet of thirty ships. Twenty-two Spanish ships at anchor were burned. The main spoils of the pirate in the service of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of Britain were three thousand barrels of excellent Spanish sherry and a load of spices taken by Drake from the Portuguese coming from India. After such a lucrative business trip, all the sailors of Drake’s squadron rightly considered their fate to be arranged. The optimistic Spaniards called this historic robbery “sample export.”
Of course, one cannot divide the strong half of humanity into only two parts: fans of port wine and fans of sherry. Although it is port and sherry that are considered the most masculine wines.
For example, creative personalities who shine in front of the ladies not so much in deeds as in words drink high-quality dry wines, both white and red. And thrifty and laconic healthy people enjoy dessert wines.
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