Spirited Event Promises to Please Imbibers of Port

Port.

The word conjures up visions of august gentlemen in smoking jackets and high-back chairs passing the decanter--clockwise, of course, as tradition demands--around a mahogany table.

Perhaps one of the gentlemen’s sons, or more likely, grandsons, has come of age, and a 21-year-old bottle, having thrown its crust, has been opened to celebrate the passage. Or perhaps they’re simply celebrating the conclusion of a decidedly non-nouvelle meal at the club, partaking of heated walnuts, quoting Winston Churchill and generally waxing philosophical.

Perhaps they’re not celebrating at all.

“Myself, I have vintage port every night,” admitted wine-maker Andrew Quady, whose ports and dessert wines will be available for tasting Saturday, from noon till 4 p.m., as part of the Meet the Winemaker series at Hi-Time Cellars in Costa Mesa.

“In fact, I know a lot of people who enjoy vintage port frequently, and who’d never think about passing it clockwise, counter-clockwise, or any other wise.”

Nevertheless, Quady, reached by telephone at his winery in Madera, said that the enjoyment of port depends to a great extent on a knowledge of its traditions.

“You wouldn’t go out and buy an expensive bottle of vintage port to lay down for at least 10 years if you weren’t familiar with the great shippers, or with the idea that this thing is going to form a crust with age. . . .

“And of course, a wine with a lot of history and tradition lends itself well to ceremony. At the end of a fancy dinner, it’s just natural to bring out a bottle of vintage port, open it up, decant it, make a special occasion out of it.”

Available for tasting will be Quady’s ’79 Vintage Port, his ’81 Frank’s Vineyard “Port of the Vintage,” two dessert wines, Essencia and Elysium, and two Champagne cocktails, utilizing Essencia and Elysium respectively.

The Vintage Port is made from zinfandel grapes. The Frank’s Vineyard bottling uses Portuguese varietals but is not intended for long-term aging.

Essencia, made from the orange muscat grape, is normally drunk by itself, a substitute for dessert, but does go well with chocolate desserts. “There’s something about the chocolate flavor that makes the orange flavor of the Essencia stand out,” said Quady, 40. He cited the “gorgeous” aroma of the black muscat grape used for Elysium: “It smells like roses.”

Quady, who does not own any vineyards but rather buys his grapes, said his stylistic goals regarding port have changed considerably.

“I made my first port in ‘75, a zinfandel from Amador County,” he said. “The first three or four years, my objective was simply to make a port from zinfandel grapes of Amador County that tasted like zinfandel grapes from Amador County made into port.

“What I’m shooting for now is all the attributes you would find in a Portuguese port from a great vintage--the chewiness, the complexity and intensity of the grape ‘fruit’ flavors, and a little bit of fieriness from the fortifying brandy.”

Quady feels his major competitors are the Portuguese ports; California ports such as Ficklin and J.W. Morris generally sell for considerably less than the $11 he asks for his wines.

Quady came to wine-making in a roundabout way.

“Before getting my masters in enology at Davis,” he recalled, “I was an experimental chemist in the explosives business. I made bombs. I was supposed to be making fireworks, but a lot of them turned out to be bombs. I’d go home from work at night, and I was so shook up from things exploding all day long, I’d just feel like having a glass of wine.

“Eventually. I got really interested in the wine and gave up the explosives.”

Last week, Jacques Maximin, consulting chef to restaurant Antoine at the Hotel Meridien in Newport Beach, came to town to celebrate the hotel’s one-year anniversary with a week of specially created lunch and dinner menus, each with a different theme.

Certainly the most ingenious had to have been a dinner called “Homage to Parmentier: The Year of the Potato,” with which Maximin celebrated the 200th anniversary of French agronomist-economist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier’s popularization of the potato.

The chef, considered to be at the vanguard of the new generation of chefs in France, incorporated potatoes into every dish--in a salad with smoked salmon, in a brandade of turbot, with a breast of duck and goose liver, and (mon Dieu!) in dessert, a souffle with rum and candied sugar.

“Eat! Eat!” he encouraged. “There are no calories!”