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It mentions in the wiki-article on Sack that the British used to drink sweet and fortified wines they called Sack not just from Sherry (Jerez) but also Canary, Mallorca (known as Palm, from the city of Palma) and Malaga.

Sweet/fortified Malaga remains in production, just. I used to drink Malaga from time to time 20-30 years ago, and very occasionally see it for sale today in England. However I only found one brand, Scholtz Hermanos, that was good - indeed it was superb - but the rest I came across were all exceedingly unpleasant, with a distinct taste of disinfectant. Google tells me Scholtz have closed. I suspect that if they had managed to hang on a little longer, the Spanish themselves would have discovered this great wine and they could have made money, a lot of money, for it. It was made with a solera system, like Sherry. A few other Malaga producers hang in, and maybe they can make this wine great again.

Canary wine is occasionally referred to in Shakespeare, and more recent literature too. This wine was made from the Malvasia grape (known as Malmsey in English, just as for Malmsey Madeira), which is still grown in the Canaries, but fortified wines appear to have long gone out of production there. I guess the Port wine trade destroyed their market.

I've never heard of Palm before. The term palm wine now refers to wine made from palm tree sap, as drunk in SE Asia, Pacific Islands, etc. Apparently wine-making was substantially abandoned in Mallorca during the phylloxera plague, but has come back again in recent decades, though a few estates date back 100 years or so. Fortified wine does not appear to be in production.

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How strange, I had some Malaga yesterday with raisins on ice cream.

I've just put two and two together.

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How strange, I had some Malaga yesterday with raisins on ice cream.

That would be an ideal thing to do with much Malaga wine. You would not do that with your Scholtz Solera 1885. It seems a few bottles of Scholtz Solera 1885 are still knocking around, but you'd have to part with around €100 to get one. I used to pay £10 for it 20-odd years ago. 1885 is not a vintage, btw, it is a part of the trademark name, being the year the solera was established. La Rioja Alta's 890 and 904 riojas are also trademarks, though English language readers would not think of these numbers as years, though years are what they originally were.

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On the subject of peculiar sherry, A friend of mine bought a weird bottle of Soviet sherry at a wine auction which seemed on first glance like a ridiculous product for anythign other than novelty value.

I never knew that the Massandra vineyard in the Crimea was Tsar Nicholas's favourite and the 1775 vintage is worth about $43k a bottle.

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