Fortified wine can be exposed to the air for weeks on end without noticeably deteriorating. This is one reason why our ancestors made such use of it: theirs was a sipping rather than a quaffing culture, and a glass of port, madeira or sherry after dinner would often be all that they would permit themselves, by way of a libation to their immortal part. All three of those great wines declined in popularity during the 20th century - a decline hastened by the EU's barbarous insistence that wine should be bottled at source, so destroying the incomparable madeiras, sherries and wood-ports that were matured and blended in casks besides the Thames.
Moreover, the habit of post-prandial sherry drinking has never really recovered from the blow struck by Edward VII in 1901, when, having inherited his mother's cellar, he promptly auctioned off the entire stock of 60,000 bottles of vintage sherry, judged to be "surplus to royal requirements".
According to the records of the auction, a certain Mr Berry, having quietly bid throughout the proceedings, carried home in triumph, at a price too appalling to disclose, the last nine dozen bottles. Part of the royal surplus thus found a temporary home in the cellars of a wine merchant which has remained to this day one of the few reliable purveyors of the drink that the royal liver could not longer tolerate.
Berry Bros and Rudd possessed incomparable expertise in the art of blending, maturing and finessing sherry, both as an aperitif and as a dessert wine. Their quaintly named "Very Choice Amontillado", aged many years in wood and blended in their cellars, kept me going during the early years of decline, when sherry was all I could afford by way of pre-prandial sustenance.
Its successor, the "Choice Fino-Amontillado" - matured, blended and bottled in Spain - is as near to the true old English sherry as you will be able now to obtain. This is a dry, nutty, complex wine that goes well as a lukewarm aperitif, and equally as an accompaniment to pates and consommes. Other finos and manzanillas should be chilled; but a good amontillado should be warm enough to smother you like incense from a Spanish chapel.
The habit of drinking sherry after dinner died out before the Second World War. But a good East India Sherry is the match for the best madeira, as the wine from Emilio Lustau, which Berry's sells at £12.45 a bottle, will easily persuade you. With 18 sherries on the current list, Berry's has done its best to vindicate the great risk taken by the then Mr Berry in 1901.
But not even Berry's can can undo the damage inflicted by our masters in Brussels, which has led to the disappearance of true vintage sherry, matured in the bottle and drunk in its fifth decade.
