At Sea
October 27, 2022
Today is our final day cruising through the Mediterranean Sea. The Captain said that in order to enter the Suez Canal, ships have to arrive the day before by 11 pm. We will arrive by 10 pm and drop anchor until canal authorities give permission to enter the canal. The Captain suspects we will be on our way at about 5 am but anything is possible.
Another sunny day with temps in the 70s. Workout, lunch by the pool and then we had a Port and Sherry tasting in the main dining room at 2 pm. There were about 8 of us seated.
from right to left….
Graham’s Six Grapes Reserve Port, Warre’s Ottima Tawny Port (10 yrs), Tio Pepe Palomino Fino Sherry, Emilio Lustau Pedro Ximenez
We visited the Sandeman Port winery during our visit to Porto, Portugal back in 2019 so we knew a bit about port. Port is a fortified wine that has alcohol added to it top stop the fermenting process. This leaves the wine sweeter and it travels well. The British wanted to bring wine back home with them and they discovered that adding brandy to it would give the wine more stability to travel in harsh conditions aboard ships.
Portugal has 250 grape varieties but only 6 are used for Port. Graham’s tasted good. My second favorite. I gave Warre’s a 5. The Tio Pepe is rough. We had a bottle back in the room and it is definitely an acquired taste. It is used to cleanse the palate before a meal. Mine needs no cleansing and I am able to start a meal with no help. The Pedro Ximenez was my favorite. The sweetest of all. Good for after dinner.
The other tasters tried to appear that they were experts on this subject by constantly correcting, interjecting, and questioning the sommelier who gave the presentation. ”There is no standard in taste of wine, poetry, prose, art, cigars, and etcetera. Each man’s own taste is the standard, and a majority vote cannot affect the supremacy of your own standard.” This was printed at the top of the tasting event letter. I didn’t feel this was the atmosphere. We had a good laugh about it.
We did the 4 pm group trivia and met Jose, Kathy, Clare, and LJ. We scored fairly well finishing with an 11 out of 17. We missed the rarest type of blood and the name of a group of sharks. The group was insistent on Steamboat Willie as Disney’s first film. I said Snow White. The answer? Snow White.
We invited Jose to join us for dinner. He has traveled and worked around the world teaching. His favorite countries are Turkey and Vietnam. We agreed that Turkey was nice but haven’t been to Vietnam yet. He seems to be happy being a loner. 2 marriages, 28 years and 9 years probably have been enough. He does have a daughter who lives in Texas near his first wife. We compared notes on the excursions we have done. Jose agreed that the HAL tours are safer but slower. The tours are marked with the amount of effort required to participate. Easy, moderate, strenuous. The last two tours we did were marked strenuous. On one tour, a woman sat on the bus the entire tour because she could barely walk. I guess the definition of strenuous means different things to different people. We had a nice dinner and thanked him for joining us.
The evening entertainment was vocalist Magali Dahan. Her show was ”An Evening in Paris”. Magali was born in Luxembourg but her roots are Egyptian. She speaks at least 5 languages fluently. I guess I expected a French accent when she spoke. She sounded like she was from Ohio. She is a very good vocalist but I thought her show needed work. I’m not sure how covering Can’t Help Falling in Love and also My Way into her set of French standards added anything. Elvis and Sinatra are tough to cover. Both of them were long gone before she was even on the planet. Terri kept waving 2 fingers at me the entire performance and then upped it to a 4 at the end. With a good programming coach, she could do very well. Her show tonight was a 5.
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