I spent most of the Christmas break in North Norfolk. I left the main roads and followed the dark icy corridors to the coast. This must have been the coldest Christmas for some time. Thankfully the charming rental cottage in Burnham Market was equipped with an electric Aga.
I became very attached to the Aga and it was a wrench to go home without one. Such a versatile chunk of metal with a very good pedigree. Always on, always available to warm, boil, roast or just lean against. A considerable impression for a glorified storage heater. It flawlessly delivered hot croissants in the morning and temperate red wine in the evening. All the better for not having to worry about the electricity it must be sucking up.
My early evening drink of choice was a Whisky Mac, a combination of Stones Original Green Ginger Wine and Famous Grouse blended whisky. My measures were one glug of whisky to two glugs of ginger wine (the 'glug' is a wildly imprecise measure that is directly related to hand-eye coordination, which in turn is proportional to consumption).
Ginger wine is essentially a fortified wine which is made from fermented raisins and ground ginger. Sounds disgusting, but its rich velvet potency nicely caresses the blended whisky into your belly, providing an inner feeling of winter warmth, much like an Aga has repositioned itself to your core.
To fortify a wine you have to add alcohol during or after the fermentation process. If added during the process then this stops fermentation and therefore leaves 'residual sugar' behind making the wine sweeter and stronger. Port is an example of this. For something like dry sherry the alcohol is added after the fermentation process, minimising the residual sugar.
The term 'residual sugar' is fairly self explanatory, a measurement of a wine's sweetness. Anything over 45 grams of sugar per litre is considered sweet. The residual sugar offset against a balance of acidity, tannin and alcohol levels delivers the actual sweetness. Playing around with acidity can deliver sweet wines with an extremely high residual sugar level, like some of the Hungarian Tokaji at 450 grams per litre. This means, that by my crude maths, there could be the equivalent of about 80 teaspoons of sugar in that 75cl bottle, compare that to Coca-Cola which has about 20 teaspoons of sugar in 75cl. A serious sugar rush.
Long trade voyages in the 16th and 17th centuries were the beginnings of fortifying wine to stabilise it and protect it from the eccentric ship motion and extreme temperature variations. This makes me wonder how my red wine survived intact on the long winding winter drive up to Norfolk.

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