Pour the pirate sherry

Pour, O pour the pirate sherry;

Fill, O fill the pirate glass;

And, to make us more than merry

Let the pirate bumper pass.

I hope the photographer doesn't mind me using this photo as the starting point for my wine tidbit: my little girl went to the OHK Opera School last summer and was one of the "daughters" for the performance. This is the opening chorus; the daughters enter much later in the first Act.

Back to the pirate sherry, I wonder if what Gilbert and Sullivan was referring to was the real thing, as opposed to the various fortified wines from elsewhere that was basking in the reflected glory of the "Sherry" name. Proper Sherry comes from a small delineated area near the port of Cadiz, where Sir Francis Drake singed the beard of the King of Spain. I wondered if he brought back any sherry to England then.

Sherry is a corruption of "Jerez" - the town after which the wine is named, and the delineated area of production is roughly bound by a triangle with Jerez de la Frontera, Puerto de Santa Maria and Sanlucar de Barrameda as the 3 apices. In the days before laws regulating origins of products, wine is shipped from nearby areas and sold as Sherry too. One of these areas is what is now the DO of Montilla-Morilles. Surprisingly, this connection is forever included in the formal classification of sherries by the term amontillado, originally meaning "in the style of Montilla"!