Warre's Otima 10 tawny port

Honey, oranges, and cloves ...

...very nice with that slice of pumpkin pie topped with whipped cream. Has it really been a week since Thanksgiving?

And nice to look forward to, on an otherwise dolorous-looking early winter day. Otima goes especially well with a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novel (The Five Red Herrings) on a quiet Saturday afternoon, the novel being all Scottish mists, a half dozen fire-eating Scottish suspects, the occasional prim mysterious woman, and lots of painstakingly collated train schedules. Will the murderer turn out to be Ferguson, or Strachan, or Farren, or Waters, or none of the above? You want to savor it all with your port.

The character I like best is Lord Peter's man, Bunter. He seems to be Wodehouse's Jeeves, before there was Jeeves -- or perhaps that is all wrong, and Jeeves came first. Or perhaps the English gentleman's personal gentleman was, in real life, such a complete human type that there was no way for any novelist to make of him anything different from what Jeeves and Bunter were.

All this savoring and sipping, and busy rustling of train schedules and eyeing of prim women, has caused us, all unthinkingly, to make inroads upon our port (no pun intended). You see how the bottle, admittedly only 500 ml, is approaching empty.

Retail, about $20.