A real vintage sherry

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I’m still working my way through boxes of things from my parents’ home, even though they died several years ago now. One thing they had accumulated was several bottles of wines and spirits. To an outsider, at first glance it might appear that they were heavy drinkers as there are quite a few bottles! But the reason there are so many is that in fact they virtually never drank. They would buy a bottle of whisky for ‘medicinal purposes’ (Mum would sometimes add a teaspoonful to her cup of tea if she felt she needed a bit of a pick-me-up) or sherry to share a glass on Christmas eve or make a trifle, but then they would put it carefully away, forget they had it, and then buy another a couple of years later when they saw what appeared to be a good deal. So now I am the owner of several bottles of blended whisky from the 1970s. Mum has written ‘1973’ on the label of one, and another has the price label of £2.49. Nowadays the same stuff costs almost ten times as much. The bottles of sherry are even older. None of them have the volume in metric units, all are in fl. oz. One of them has a price label of 94p. And the oldest of all (which was only half full) had the legend ‘By Appointment to the late King George V’. A business is only allowed to use the ‘by Royal Appointment’ warrant for up to two years after the death of the person in question. And George V died in 1936, so this bottle must date from between 1936 and 1938. My Mum was born in 1924 so I think she must have inherited this bottle from her parents! I mentioned this to a friend and he said ‘I dare you to sniff it!’ Well I prised the cork out, with some difficulty, and poured out a small glass. It looked like sherry, it smelt like sherry, and yes, it tasted like sherry too. In fact it was rather good! So in case you ever wondered, I guess sherry does age well, even in an opened bottle! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2024.