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3 Great Things About Madeira
December 28, 2010 by David
Filed under Wine Words
This is another wine that warms us from within and tastes so good this time of year! Madeira is as perverse as it is delicious. It involves two of the biggest “don’ts” in a winemaking textbook!
1. Allowing the wine to oxidize is a real no-no because the wine will spoil. Well, oxidation is what gives Madeira it’s delightfully nutty character.
2. Heating the wine is verboten, but baking the Madeira makes it so deliciously caramelized!
So, the three great things?
#1: It’s delicious
#2: It ranges from dry to sweet so it can carry you through a whole meal!
#3: Since it’s already “spoiled”, you can keep an open bottle around forever and the wine is no worse for the wear! Cheers! More about Madeira
Madeira
Madeira, takes the prize as a winemaking oddity yet it’s one of the most luscious wines among the fortified options. You wouldn’t know it by checking the shelves in your wine shop these days, but fine Madeira has a long, illustrious history here in the US. According to Bartholomew Broadbent, one of our foremost authorities on Port and Madeira, it was the wine of choice, in America, before Prohibition and he claims that an amazing 95% of all Madeira was sold in America up to that time. Most others seem to place the quantity at 25%. Apparently, five years before the Boston Tea Party, there was a similar Boston Wine Party, of sorts, when the Brits sought to increase the tariff and drinking Madeira became a symbol of defiance. This makes it very appropriate that the signing of the Declaration of Independence was toasted with a glass of Madeira. And, as Madeira producers like to remind us, it’s said that George Washington drank a pint of it a day with his dinner.
Among the winemaking eccentricities, it begins with location. This lush and beautiful island is located about 600 miles southwest of the mainland, Portugal, and about 400 miles west of Morocco. Much of the island isn’t suitable for planting because it rises abruptly, out of the sea, to about 6000 feet, and the vineyard land must be terraced. Also, subtropical climates aren’t generally recommended as prime places for viticulture. Our challenges with mildew here in warm, dry Napa Valley can’t begin to compare what they’re dealing with there.
Another anomaly is that there are some American hybrid varieties used for winemaking along with the European ones. When American varieties for grafting came over in the wake of the phylloxera epidemic in the late 1800s, some growers chose to save time by growing the hybrids rather than grafting their Portuguese varieties onto them. They’re no long used in classic Madeira wine but they’re still permitted for table wines.
And the greatest of all of its eccentricities, from a winemaker’s point of view, is that the wine is deliberately baked – normally a recipe for disaster.
History
As far as we know, wine has been made on the island since about 1600 and, like port, it didn’t begin as a fortified wine. When it came time for export, the thin, weak wines didn’t travel well, so the alcohol addition became a matter of practicality and was the standard by the mid 1700s.
In the mid-1600s ships en route to India, began stopping routinely at Madeira port town, Funchal, to load up with wine. To get home, the ships had to pass through the tropics and, evidently, the rocking and rolling in the rather hot ship somehow made the light, tart wine softer, rounder and delightfully caramelized. The time-honored theory that if a little is good, more is better, took over from there, and by the late 1700s Madeira wine was routinely sent on round trips when these voyages included crossing the equator. They called it vinho da roda or round-trip wine! It was considered to be much superior to the wine that matured at home. Eventually, as you might imagine, the trend was toward aging wine the easy way, in heated rooms, or tanks, called estufas.
By the late 1600s there were nearly 30 shippers out of Madeira but blow after blow, beginning in the mid-1800s, nearly killed the industry. Just before the phylloxera outbreak, there was a nearly equally destructive mildew problem that wiped out about 90% of the crop in 1852. As they recovered from these crises and things began to look good, again, in the early part of the 20th century, the French ports closed and two major customers dried up. Russia, because of the revolution of 1917, with America, close on its heels, due to prohibition. It’s only been in very recent decades that Madeira has made a solid comeback. As recently as the turn of this century, there were only six export companies.
