Sobretable

In Sherry production, the term for the period of time a new wine spends before it goes into the solera. The sobretable is usually 6 to 8 months, but ooccassionally up to a year.

Where does the name California come from?

A. It's a Native American phrase meaning "bountiful land"

B. It's based on a 16th century romance novel featuring a black warrior queen

C. It's a reference to a presidio (military fort) of the same name in the Mexican state of Sonora

D. It's taken from an early text on methods of religious conversion used by Franciscan missionaries to convert indigenous people to Catholicism

The name California was used officially in Spanish documents as early as 1542. It comes from a description of a fabled, gold-laden island called California in the popular Spanish romance novel Las Sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián) by Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo. The island was ruled by a black warrior queen named Queen Califia who ruled over a kingdom of black women. Some historians believe that the early Spanish explorers who moved north from Mexico may have thought that what is now California was an island.

“He planned dinners, of enchanting aromatic foods that should be carried under the nose, snuffed and then thrown to the dogs … endless dinners, in which one could alternate flavour with flavour from sunset to dawn without satiety, while one breathed great draughts of the bouquet of old brandy.

— Vile Bodies (1930) by Evelyn Waugh, as quoted by Charles Spence in Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating

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