CHAPTER III
PORT
That port should follow sherry is, or ought to be, to any decent Englishman, a thing requiring no argument. My cellar, if not exactly my cellar-book (which, as has been said, did not begin till some years later), was founded in this eminent respect on a small supply of 1851 (I think, but am not sure, Cockburn’s), whereof my friend in Pall Mall, but from Scotland, who supplied it, ingenuously said that for his part he liked rich port, but that for a medium dry wine he did not think it could be surpassed. Nor have I, to my remembrance, ever drunk much better than this, or than some magnums of the same shippers and vintage which succeeded it, and were bought at the sale of that air-travelling victim, Mr. Powell, of Wiltshire.
[Neither Google nor Richard Kebabjian of PlaneCrashInfo.com have been able to identify Mr. Powell, the latter even having checked newspaper archives from 1903 onwards.] Indeed, I think ’51 was the finest port, of what may be called the older vintages accessible to my generation, that I ever tasted ; it was certainly the finest that I ever possessed. The much talked of 1820 I do not think that I ever drank
securus, that is to say, under circumstances which assured its being genuine. Some ’34, with such a guarantee, I have drunk, and more ’47, the latter when it was about in perfection (say, in 1870) to a date the other day when it was some sixty years old and little but a memory, or at least a suggestion. But ’51 in all its phases, dry, rich and medium, was, I think, such a wine as deserved the famous and pious encomium (slightly altered) that the Almighty might no doubt have caused a better wine to exist, but that he never did.