Madeira so dear to us over the centuries

Nov 6 2009 by Helen Savage, The Journal

HAVE some Madeira, m’dear, I’ve got a small cask of it here,” goes the Flanders and Swann song, “and once it’s been opened, you know it won’t keep …” Such deception is only to be expected, I suppose, from a seducer who was “old, vile and no stranger to vice,” for, of course, Madeira wine will keep. It’s almost indestructible.

A couple of weeks ago, I was privileged to take part in a seminar in London when we tasted one style of Madeira wine – Bual (sometimes Boal) in vintages going back to 1908.

Until then, the oldest Madeira I’d ever sipped was a bottle of 1954, also Bual, which I bought from Richard Granger in Jesmond for a huge sum of money to mark a special birthday of someone very close to me.

We drank it together; but not all at once. Unlike sherry or port, Madeira wine doesn’t go stale if you leave it in the sideboard for a few weeks, or months.

That 1908, which had been in a cask and then a large glass carboy for a century in the cellars of Pereira D’Oliveira, was intensely perfumed, rather balsamic, with hints of coffee and burnt orange peel. Still sweet, it was powerful raisiny and almost as fresh as a daisy. Blandy’s 1920 Bual was even finer, staggeringly intense and still reminiscent of fresh fruits, especially peach and orange.

Of course, such fabulous old wines are rare. Older bottles do occasionally surface and they don’t often disappoint. The secret of their amazing longevity and distinctive taste is in the way they’re made. The higgledy-piggledy vineyards on the sub-tropical island bear grapes that are surprisingly tart. While the fermenting juice is still sweet, alcohol is added to kill the yeast.

The young wine is then treated to the indignity of being abandoned in a barrel, high in the warmest part of the cellars, as near the roof as possible.

And if the producer wants to cut costs, the wine is heated in a tank by hot-water pipes to a 45C – and held at that temperature for three months.

It seems like madness. The wine oxidises and bakes. Technically spoiled, it becomes ‘maderised’. But because it contains around 20% alcohol, enough to see off any lurking acetobacteria, it doesn’t turn into vinegar. It’s stable. And the naturally high acidity of the wine helps it to stay fresh for a century or two.

The process was discovered by accident in the 17th Century when casks of Madeira wine were shipped across the equator en route to India. It later became hugely popular in the American colonies. George Washington couldn’t get enough of it.

There are four famous grape varieties for Madeira wine, each of which corresponds to a wine style – Sercial (normally dry), Verdelho (medium dry), Bual (medium sweet) and Malmsey, alias Malvasia (rich and sweet). A fifth variety is rarely seen – Terrantez – and is highly rated. All these are white, but most grapes grown on Madeira are black, a variety called Tinta Negra, which is used to make the cheaper wine, aged for just three years. Clearly the old lecher in the song didn’t serve the good stuff. His wine was red.

In reality, thanks to the maderising process, all Madeira wine tends to emerge with a hue that is somewhere between amber and mahogany. The finest old wines are like burnished copper, sometimes with an intriguing greenish glint.