Aperitifs, digestifs and fortified wine

An aperitif is what you drink before eating, and it's meant to sharpen the appetite - dry, usually bitter, usually not very strong. A digestif comes afterwards and is meant to settle things: sweeter, heavier, often taken neat.

The distinction is cultural rather than chemical, and it's useful anyway, because it predicts where a bottle belongs in an evening. Vermouth, dry sherry and a Negroni are aperitifs. Cognac, Drambuie, Kahlúa, limoncello and a Rusty Nail are digestifs.

Fortified wine is wine with a spirit - usually grape spirit - added to it. That raises the strength to roughly 15–22%, and if it's added during fermentation it also kills the yeast early, leaving the unfermented sugar behind. That's why the sweet ones are sweet: the sugar was never fermented out.

• Sherry - from Jerez in Spain, and drier than its reputation. Fino and manzanilla are bone dry and want serving cold; oloroso and cream sherries are richer. Fino goes into a Bloody Mary and improves it.
• Vermouth - aromatised wine, and it has to contain wormwood: the name is the German Wermut. Dry (French) is pale and crisp; sweet or rosso (Italian) is red and spiced; bianco sits between them. It's wine, so it goes off - fridge, and finish it within a month.
• Port - Portuguese and sweet. Ruby is young and fruity; tawny is wood-aged, nutty and dry-finishing; white port is made from white grapes and is good chilled with tonic. Vintage port is bottle-aged and can run thirty years.
• Madeira - from the island, and deliberately heated during maturation, which gives it a burnt, caramelised character and makes it almost indestructible once open.

The bitter aperitifs - Campari, Aperol, and the amari behind them - are a category of their own, and they carry the Negroni, the Boulevardier, the Contessa and the spritz. They're covered properly in the next chapter, since bitterness is a structural ingredient rather than a flavour you add at the end.