Fortified Wine

Neutral grape spirit goes into the wine, and the moment it goes in decides everything downstream. Add it while fermentation is still running and the rising alcohol stops the yeast, so whatever sugar has not yet been converted stays in the wine as sweetness. Wait until fermentation has finished and there is nothing left to preserve, which gives a dry fortified wine. The rest follows from that single decision: how long the wine can sit in wood, how it behaves once the bottle is open, and how much of the grape flavour survives.

South Africa once printed the words port and sherry on these labels. Under a trade agreement with the European Union those names were given up, since they belong to specific places in Portugal and Spain, and local producers moved to a Cape vocabulary instead. Cape Ruby is young and fruity, Cape Tawny has spent years in wood and turns nutty and brown at the rim, and Cape Vintage comes off a single declared year.

Jerepigo is fortified right at the start of fermentation, or before it begins at all, so almost the whole of the grape sugar survives and the wine ends up intensely sweet. Muscadel is made from Muscat grapes and comes in red and white versions, with a grapey, raisined character that is hard to mistake for anything else. Both are old Cape styles, and Robertson and the Klein Karoo are closely associated with them.

Touriga Nacional, Tinta Barocca and Souzao are the Portuguese names that turn up most often on a South African back label. Calitzdorp in the Klein Karoo built its reputation on them, helped by hot summers and thick skinned berries.

Longer than a table wine, and the reason is the alcohol combined with the way the wine was matured. A tawny style has already spent years in contact with air inside a barrel, so a few more weeks recorked in the fridge change very little about it. A vintage style has been kept away from air the entire time and reacts to it much faster, so treat that bottle as a matter of days rather than weeks. The rule of thumb is straightforward: the more air a wine has already seen, the less the next bit of air matters.

A sweet fortified wine takes a light chill, roughly twelve to fourteen degrees, which stops it feeling heavy and syrupy. Pour a modest measure into an ordinary wine glass, since the alcohol runs higher than in a table wine.