1876 Facts About Sherry by Henry Vizetelly

Some other Jerez Bodegas.

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palms,pines,cedars,cypresses,cacti,orangeand pomegranatetrees in profusion. Shady elms lined its pleasantwalks,swansreflected themselvesin its rippling waters,and myriadsofgold-fishswam in glistening circles around its plashingfountain. Senor de Agreda's house,with its patio in the style of one of the courts of the Alhambra,is no less beautiful than his garden,and his wines are worthy ofthe taste which these display. His stock numbers between 8,000 and 9,000 butts; and he boasts of some rai-e old wine purchased flve-and-twenty years ago at the rate of .£240 per butt,which had lain in a cellar untouched for more than one generation, and was reputed to be fuUy a century old. The amontillados we tasted here were perfect, and so were some samples of finofrom Seiior de Agreda's own vineyard.Las Canas, which produces a remarkably delicate wine. The establishment of Senor Julian Pemartin—a great sherry shipper, who,finding Jerez had merely a plain-looking Moorish Alcazar, provided it with a highly ornate palace in the Louis Quatorze style—is entered through one of its principal bodegas. Crossing this we fiLnd ourselves in a pleasant court planted with trees, and having a picturesque dome-roofed structure in its centre. The old-established house prides itself on its amon tillados, several fine samples of which, of gradually-increasing age, we tasted. We were also shown some vino de paste,afull- flavoured, amber-tinted sherry, of fine quality. The father of Senor Pemartin was the first who introduced a Jerez wine into England under this now weU-known but slightly inappropriate name, and his shipments of it met with remarkable success. Samples of wines oftheold sherry type,whose tinthad deepened with age and not through the medium of vino de color,and some of the soleras of which dated as far back as the year 1818,were next shown to us. Spite of the excessive pungency common to wines of this great age,a real vinous flavour was nevertheless discernible in the majority of them. The house of Jose Pemartin,owner of the well-known vine yard in the Cerro de Santiago,is an offshoot from the above. Stored in different bodegas are some venerable soleras in casks