The Island of Madeira -- Thirteen intrepid wine enthusiasts boarded planes last week and flew to this tiny island in the mid-Atlantic to discover, learn about, and taste some of the world’s rarest wines – some of them 150-years-old and still abundantly youthful!
The expedition was led by two Madeira wine specialists; the indefatigable Roy Hersh, one of North America’s most knowledgeable Port and Madeira experts for whom this was his 12th group tour to Madeira. Think of Roy as the Indiana Jones of Portuguese wine and you will get an idea of his swashbuckling, spit-in-the-bucket wine style. His very capable side-kick, who organized our trip from the Madeira side, was Mario Ferreira, a Lisbon resident with his own colorful wine industry career.
Mrs. napaman and I were two of the 13 team members hell bent to unearth liquid gold.
Hold on to your (funny looking!) hats!
Roy Hersh and Mario Ferreira speed down a steep, mile-long hill in a toboggan sled, a tourist activity in Funchal, capital of Madeira. (It’s one way of putting the Fun in Funchal...)
Madeira may belong to Portugal, but this tiny gulag (given its history as a quality wine destination, perhaps I should say “this tiny glug-glug?”) is geographically closer to Africa (366 miles off the coast of Casablanca) than it is to Portugal.
Madeira was a prosperous farming center 600 years ago, exporting sugar, grain, timber and even wine back then to the European mainland.
Records show that Malvasia grapes were planted here more than 350 years before America was even founded.
The purpose of our seven-day Madeirathon was to see many sights on the island and, given our collective interest in wine, visit the eight remaining Madeira wine producers, conducting a thorough review of current releases and past glories.
Some producers let us taste library wines going back to the mid-1800s. (I like to hang out with 150-year-old anythings – it makes me feel so young in comparison!)
The Thing About Madeira
Unlike other wines, the more harshly Madeira is treated in its youth – through exposure to heat, oxygen, or movement – the more resilient and tastier it becomes decades, even centuries, later.
An explanation for this: the natural acidity of Madeira grapes is so naturally high that oxygen is prevented from gaining a foothold to turn this wine into another, noxious kind of acid -- acetic.
According to winemaker/chemists on the island, there is so much fruit acid in the wine that it acts as a shield against spoilage.
Oxygen virtually cannot turn Madeira into vinegar no matter when it makes its end run – while the wine is aging for 20, or more, years in cask, or when a bottle is left open for months on the counter.
You know the standard drill: Pull the cork and leave a bottle of table wine open over night and there’s a good chance that it will turn into vinegar the next day.
But expose a bottle of Madeira to oxygen and the wine just gets better! If anything, oxygen resuscitates Madeira, improving the flavor, giving the wine new life and vigor!
As such, I think it’s safe to call Madeira the Terminator of Wine. You can’t harm, or hurt, it. Expose Madeira to air, leave a bottle open for months, heat it, shake it up – you just can’t bruise it.
In fact, like the Terminator, the more you mistreat this wine, the more resolve it shows to take even more punishment!
They’ve been making Madeira on this island since the 1400s and to confirm just how good an old bottle can be, the single best wine I tasted all last year was a 1795 Madeira made from the Terrantez grape. You can read about it here:
http://www.napaman.com/napamancom/2016/02/i-spent-valentines-day-with-an-old-heart-throb-a-216-year-old-wine-that-is-still-youthful.html
About the island
Porto Moniz, on the northwest corner of Madeira, a stunning destination for swimming in ocean tide pools
Madeira, one of four islands in a small archipelago in the mid-Atlantic, covers 286 square miles.
By comparison, Napa Valley is 789 sq. miles, more than 2.5 times larger than the entire island of Madeira.
On Madeira, only 1,174 acres are planted with the six principal grapes used to make Madeira.
By comparison, 45,000 acres of vines are planted in Napa Valley -- that’s 38 times greater.
There are now only eight remaining producers of Madeira on the island; by comparison, there are 1,000 producers of wine in Napa Valley.
But where Madeira beats Napa Valley wines hands down is in compexity, longevity, elegance, and sheer drama.
No Napa Valley will ever age 220 years and still present itself as “astoundingly youthful,” alive, bright, and filled with the flavors of treacle, coffee, mocha, tobacco, apricots, orange zest, honey, brown sugar, marmalade, cinnamon, baked apples, fruit cake, or burnt sugar, -- all of which are descriptors I found myself using often to describe the 144 wines we tasted on our week-long tour.
Day 1
Our first day began with an overview, more about the geography of the island than about its wine.
Highlights included:
An aerial tram ride high across the capital city, Funchal
A brief visit to a spectacular botanical garden, the Tropical Garden of Monte Palace, described by Conde Nast Traveler as “one of the 13 most beautiful botanical gardens in the world.”
Thrill-seeking tourists course one mile down an extremely steep hill in a sled outfitted with wooden runners and steered by two gondoliers sporting straw boater hats and thickly soled shoes.
A 30-minute afternoon bus ride took us to the northwest corner of Madeira where our group experienced the natural sea wonders of Porto Moniz.
BTW: Locals say that it used to take hours to cross the island because vehicles had to follow old, wormy, switchback trails high up and over the central mountain range which divides this island; but an injection of EU cash helped finance the construction of 180 tunnels, many quite long, and now one can drive across the island in under an hour.
Dinner was served in a high-altitude restaurant located in a national park where large chunks of tender beef were skewered on stalks of laurel….
… grilled over hot coals….
… and then hung on chains which dangled from the ceiling, enabling diners to slip moist, perfectly grilled cubes of beef from the laurel stalks…. DELICIOUS!
What we drank to wash down our beef …. 10 bottles of Justino’s Madeira, the oldest dating to 1934.
Day 2
This was a day of study and great food. The group assembled at IVBAM, which sounds like an iPhone app to regulate the flow of fluids from an IV drip, but which actually stands for the Institute do Vinho do Bordado e do Artesanato da Madeira. In other words, the regulatory body which sets standards for, among other things, Madeira wine.
During a three-hour lecture and Madeira tasting, the group learned that there are only eight Madeira producers left on the island; that there are six basic varieties of grape commercially grown (5 are white, one is black); that the island soil is mostly volcanic; that 47 percent of the entire island land mass is either forest or mountain – inhospitable for planting grapes; that there are 2,015 grape growers supplying the eight producers.
In the old days, when George Washington was President of America, for example, the grape of choice in Washington was Terrantez; a hundred years later, after phylloxera and odium struck vines here in the mid-to-late 1800s, other varieties necessarily became the workhorse grapes of Madeira – Sercial (driest), Verdelho, Boal (also spelled Bual) and Malvasia (sweetest).
Today, even these grapes have largely been replaced by a more commercially viable grape. Today, 85 percent of all the grapes planted on Madeira are Tinta Negra, according to IVBAM.
Madeira wines are made by fermenting island-grown grapes; at a desired point during fermentation, the process is halted by the addition of Spanish, or French, grape spirits, The resultant mass is then treated in one of two ways:
Either the wine will spend three months being heated in circulating tanks cranked up to 122 F degrees, then it will be permitted to rest for assessment and categorization. This is called Estufagem.
OR
Better wines may be selected from the outset to age in oak casks, which are kept in a modestly warmed environment (about 113 F degrees) called a canteiro for years, or decades.
Lunch time!
The group assembled at a Funchal restaurant, Chalet Vicente, where multiple wines were served with multiple courses.
In order to understand how difficult it is to start a winery on the island, the group visited Madeira Vintners, a cooperative venture that is barely four years old; its first release was a series of four Madeiras released in 2016, which we tasted.
Dinner time!
One of the top dining experiences on the island was dinner at The Fort restaurant, in Funchal, constructed within a Portuguese fort dating back to 1614.
I was particularly struck by the architecture of the fort, the color it has been painted and the care given to the food and service at the restaurant.
All Top notch.
Waiting for appetizers at The Fort restaurant
After dinner, we toured an 8-block quarter of Funchal which is – how best to describe it? – Bohemian. Residents of this ‘hood have painted their doors with amazing, original works of art. We walked through the quarter after midnight.
An original painting on a door on the “Street of Doors.”
Midnight on the “Street of Doors”
Day 3
The large quantity of sugar cane growing on Madeira supports the activities of three rum producers on the island.
Today, we visited the only producer still using steam engines to process cane stalks -- Engenho do Norte, on the northeast coast of the island, in Porto da Cruz.
I loved the visual aspect of this facility:
Trucks arrive at the rum works, sagging from the weight of just-cut stalks of sugar cane.
The cane is processed in a steam-powered factory, the 100-decibel machines husking the cane stalks look like something Rube Goldberg designed.
The cane bark is stripped and the pulp processed, fermented and turned into rum.
Naturally, given the propensity of our group to taste and rate anything containing alcohol, we set upon a hostess named Isabel, asking her to pour ALL the rum varieties made here.
To be factually correct, the beverage made from fermented sugar cane here is NOT called rum.
Labels identify the resultant beverage as “Arguardente de cana,” or “firewater from cane sugar.”
If you asked an inhabitant of Madeira for “rum,” there’s a good chance they wouldn’t know WTF you are speaking about.
Our hostess, Isabel, pours our group ALL the rums produced here.
We were treated to 5-, 15-, 30-, 40-year, and unblended, single-cask arguardente, bottled under the brand J. Faria & Filhos, Engenho’s parent company
The line-up of Madeira wines also made by this firm, which we tasted and rated. Madeira wine -- the breakfast of champions! It is still early in the morning!
Lunch time!
The thing about one of Roy Hersh’s Port, or Madeira, tours is that whatever day it is, you will swear that your watch is broken. Eat again? Didn’t we just get up from a sensational three-hour lunch? What’s that you say? Time for dinner already?
Today’s 3-hour lunch was served in a glorious, al fresco, setting – the patio of a beautiful resort called Quinta do Furao (which means “estate of the ferrets” in Portuguese), in a small hamlet on the outskirts of a small town, Sao Jorge.
I enjoyed not only one of my favorite dishes of the trip (so far), but one of the best expressions of rabbit I’ve ever had – a dish to rival the classic standard at Mustards Grill in Yountville (if you’ve never had Cindy’s rabbit – it’s a must try!).
We now interrupt this long story to introduce the highlight of today’s Madeira search:
… a tasting at H. M. Borges, in Funchal, one of the traditional Madeira producers on the island, and the only facility run by women.
Isabel (left) and Helena (right) Borges
The women are fourth generation Borges cousins, the daughters of grandson brothers whose grandfather started the Madeira firm in 1877.
Madeira wines being aged… come back in 20 years, please, and we’ll have some wine for you….
The firm only uses neutral, French and American oak barrels; “neutral” means that they are reused – and reused again. Borges never introduces new wood to the process of aging Madeira – but they do spend a lot of time and money repairing their inventory of 700 barrels.
Tasting notes:
There is a wonderful common fingerprint to all the wines we tasted, evidence that there is a single winemaker here who has threaded all these wines with bright acidity, even the sweeter ones, who has produced phenomenal, perfectly balanced, wines of exceptional purity, freshness, and complexity.
Helena Borges lines up the Madeiras we tasted.
My favorite wine of the tasting was the 1990 Borges Sercial (that’s the grape), a fabulous expression of fruit, acidity and sensual allure.
My tasting notes included this comment: “Good Lord, this is great shit!”
The wine has impeccable attack, a spine of brisk acidity, displays a voluptuous crescendo of flavors including toffee and coffee and finishes with a lingering note of fresh lemon.
Many of us in the group loved many of the wines we tasted at Borges and bemoaned the fact that none of them were readily available in the US.
But napaman has learned that this situation is about to be remedied; a new importer, Next Chapter Wines & Spirits, has finalized terms and will become the exclusive importer of Borges’ wines in the US.
Napaman exclusive!
To get on the mailing list and learn what wines will initially be available, send an email to:
[email protected]
For the record: napaman is the first source to publicly reveal that Borges wines will be available in the US starting this fall, and the first to share the contact information of the importer, which is Pennsylvania based.)
Day 4
Today we cranked up the quality and number of wines tasted, visiting two legendary Madeira producers. In total, we tasted 32 Madeiras today.
Stop One wasn’t so much a run-of-the-mill, facility tour and wine tasting as it was the equivalent of dropping in on an advanced class of chemistry, philosophy, and alchemy, taught by a charismatic professor with a degree in stand-up soliloquy.
Call this class Madeira 101, offered at Henriques & Henriques, in the small coastal village of Camara do Lobos.
The firm is the third largest producer of Madeira on the island.
The instructor was Humberto Jardim, managing director and owner of H&H, as it is known in the trade.
Humberto Jardim leads instruction in a class, which could easily be called “Madeira 101.”
As we tasted through 12 wines with Humberto, he shared details about Madeira, which I had either forgotten, or never known:
+ Humberto put into perspective the four varieties of grape most often used to make classic Madeira. He created a kind of color/flavor mnemonic to help us better understand each grape’s characteristics:
Sercial. This grape makes the driest wine. Think of it as the color GREEN.
Flavors include fresh grass, pale hay, pea shoots.
Verdelho. Slightly sweeter, this grape projects the color ORANGE.
Flavors found in a Verdelho Madeira include orange, orange zest, orange oil, tangerine, peaches, apricots.
Boal. Sweeter yet. Think of the color BROWN.
Flavors, which this wine suggest, include coffee, toffee, caramel, burnt sugar, honey, milk, butter. “These are the flavors of our childhood; look for them in a Boal,” says Humberto.
He also noted that there are often hints of minerality in a Boal, as well as a metallic finish, which resembles “the scent on your hands after you hold coins.”
Malvasia. The sweetest of the Big Four grapes used to make Madeira. Think of the color MAHOGANY.
Flavors found in a Malvasia (sometimes called Malmsey) include burnt sugar, or molasses.
A line-up of what we tasted with Humberto.
Among my favorites of the day:
1954 H&H Malvasia. Sipping this wine is like setting fireworks off in your mouth – your palate lights up with small explosions of wonderment; there are explosive, juicy, coffee, toffee and burnt sugar notes, a profound undercurrent of acid runs through the performance. It’s like the end-of-night fireworks at Disneyland going off in your mouth. Gob-smacking glorious!
1957 H&H Boal. There is such perfect balance in this wine, a harmonious yin and yang of sweetness and acidity, with flavors of orange, orange zest and tangerine running wild along the entire length of the taste and swallow; you can’t spit this wine out in a tasting – impossible!
A “canteiro” outdoors, as a display, at H&H.
One of the terms used in the production of Madeira wines is “canteiro,” which refers to a long shelf, or beam, on which barrels rest for a minimum of two years, while the room in which they sit is heated to between 113 and 122 F degrees to promote oxidative aging. This encourages evaporation, which concentrates the wine, giving it more complexity.
And now for something completely different…
Ricardo Freitas
In the afternoon, we dropped in on another master class, this one taught at Barbeito, one of the great Madeira houses. Our instructor was the fabled Dean of Madeira, Ricardo Diogo V. Freitas, managing director.
Among Madeira cognoscenti, Ricardo is considered one of the top master wine blenders alive.
Ricardo, the alchemist
Ricardo’s passion is to find demi-johns of hundred-year-old Madeira in a hidden corner of his winery, rehabilitate the wine with air, using inventive, self-discovered decanting practices, which turn the old wines into a mind-bending, mouth-pleasing, sensory-overloading, forehead-slapping experience.
Think of Ricardo as an alchemist, or a character in Harry Potter’s world, capable of turning mere dross into pleasurable liquid gold. If Ricardo would only drop the slim-fit suits and don a Merlin cape…. he would start to get the Merlin recognition he deserves.
Julia Freitas, who is a lawyer by day, and her husband Ricardo, who is a Madeira Wizard Winemaker by day, brought Ricardo’s palate-inoculating, mind-boggling, 40-year-old Malvasia to dinner – which is like having Christian Mouiex bring a bottle of his Chateau Petrus to dinner -- you get a wine of impeccable authority brought by the legend who made it.
Someone in the group asked Ricardo about the importance of vintage in Madeira wines.
“While all other wine regions are concerned about “vintage,” Madeira, which is made from any one of a group of six to eight different grapes, cares NOTHING about vintage,” says Ricardo. “Strong vintages can produce poor wines, and weak summers can produce amazing wines.”
“A season that is good for Sercial (grape) may be horrendous for Malvasia (another grape). The concept of vintages, as they are known in America, or Europe, means nothing here on Madeira.”
Due to the varieties grown to make Madeira wine, and due to climatic conditions on the island, winemakers here pick grapes with a much lower sugar level – and a much higher acid level -- than we ever would pick in North American wine varieties.
In Napa valley, we wait for many grape varieties to reach 28 to 30 brix before harvest. Brix is a measure of soluble sugars.
By contrast, grapes harvested on Madeira are rarely more than 16.36 brix, which means they have HALF the sugar which grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay, in Napa Valley, have when picked.
Basically, what isn’t sugar in a grape, chemically speaking, is acid.
By industry standards on Madeira, grapes must have a minimum brix content of 16.36 when harvested, Francisco Albuquerque, winemaker at Blandy’s, told me.
Few grapes on the island are able to jump much higher in sugar content. There just isn’t enough sun, enough heat, or enough length to the summer to make this happen.
The resultant wines, made from grapes with low sugar, and high acid, produce wines with low alcohol once fermented and tart, bright acidity, which stays alive in the fermented mass.
As explained much earlier in this book-length story, is the fact that this high level of acidity is prevents Madeira from oxidizing, as other wines would if exposed to air during the process of maturation.
My, oh my, Madeira wine is such an odd duck in the wine world. No wonder so few people understand it, grok it, enjoy it, or drink it.
But enough of this chemistry… let’s get back to Ricardo
Knowing that our wine-centric group was coming, Ricardo selected 17 wines for us to taste, covering three centuries of his family’s production. (Honest -- three centuries!)
Many of Ricardo’s wines had me slapping my forehead in wonderment, uttering comments like, ”How can he make such mind-blowing wine? This stuff is the crack cocaine of wine – it is totally addictive! I need to buy some of this!“
Among the highlights of our tasting:
Barbeito 30-year-old Malvasia, Vo Vera, of which there are only 612 bottles in the whole world.
Ricardo says that he thinks, “this is the best single wine I have ever made in my entire life,” which is like having Stephen Curry identify which of his hundreds of 3-point shots from center court is his best career dunk.
Ricardo calls this “a wine of precision.” I call it a fucking perfect wine-making tour de force. You can’t put more wine into a wine.
This beauty sings, dances and spins plates on pointy sticks -- all at the same time. If Ed Sullivan were still alive and on the air, this wine would be a headliner for his Sunday night’s TV broadcast.
Barbeito 40-year-old, Malvasia Mae Manuela of which there are only 87 cases for worldwide consumption.
Our tour leader Roy Hersh thought that this wine was even more memorable, more monumental, than Ricardo’s 30-year old Malvasia (above). And if you had heard the discussion, which ensued, between these two -- about which was the better wine -- you would have compared their debate to that of two Socratic-era philosophers arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
One of the reasons this wine is so compelling is that Ricardo did some fine-tuning and added a trace (seven percent by weight) of an 1880 Malvasia, which he found in a demi-john in a corner of the winery! (He could have added his 1880 Malvasia to a jar of Bovril and it would taste great! THAT’s how powerful this component is in Ricardo’s experimental blend.)
Barbeito 1863 Boal. This was the highest scoring wine of the tasting for me, a profound expression of winemaking skill. A legendary wine. This wine had been in the same cask for 145 years when, in 2008, it was transferred to a demi-john. The wine was bottled three months ago, in February of this year. You want Impeccable wine with a capital I – this is it.
What we tasted at Barbeito. No kidding. And there were NO duds.
Day 5
Blandy’s, one of the larger, old-family, Madeira producers on the island, has been at this business for 206 years.
A visit to Blandy’s corporate headquarters in Funchal is a bit like a visit to Robert Mondavi Winery, in Oakville, Napa Valley. You get a thorough, educational tour, covering every aspect of wine-making; you learn how wine is made, you see artifacts which are relevant to the family and history of the winery; you can sign up for different levels of tasting.
The one thing you can do at Blandy’s, which you can’t do at Mondavi, is dine in a sensational bistro on site; we ate well at lunch and bought the last remaining bottle of a sensational 1920 Blandy’s Boal, which put a top spin on the meal.
How many lunches have you had in your life where, off the menu, you can order a 97-year-old wine that is in perfect, youthful condition, delivering joy and supreme happiness to your jaunty jowls?
Our Blandy’s tour was led by an informative guide, Rita, who related Blandy family history and told us how Madeira is made then walked us through the wine-making process; we visited the canteiro, where wine, in 700-liter barrels, is aged. We visited a small museum where old instruments for making wine on the island are displayed in cases; we came upon a wonderful selection of old Madeira wine labels, among which were these:
Walking through a virtual museum of Madeira wines, I came upon an ancient wine press, first used on the island 400 years ago, in the 1600s. That makes it even older than Henry Kissinger -- and I didn’t think anything could be older than him!
400-year-old Madeira wine press
On the tour, our guide Rita took us into a very well secured vault containing the Blandy family’s personal library of Madeira wines.
The oldest wine in the cellar is an 1755 Malvasia, the year of the famous Lisbon earthquake. The wine was made 21 years before there even was an America.
A shelf in the family’s wine library -- just beneath the 1755 Malvasia
At lunch, we ordered the last bottle of 1920 Blandy’s Boal off the shelf of the in-house winery restaurant.
How good was this wine? 98 points good. My tasting notes read:
“Coffee, coffee, coffee on the nose, with some toffee thrown in for good measure. The nose alone goes on for a minute!
There is a core of delicate, persistent acidity, which runs the entire length of the taste experience; it is wrapped in a blanket of treacle and orange zest. The finish lingers for a long time and ends with echoes of fresh coffee grounds and a squeeze of lime.”
As there are now no other 750 mL bottles of this magical, 97-year-old wine left at the winery, we will have to wait until Blandy’s fills bottles with what remains of this wine in aging casks. And believe me, it ain’t much.
In fact, getting ready for this occasion, Blandy’s recently transferred this wine out of cask into small demi-johns for safe keeping (mostly to stop evaporation; winemaker Francisco Albuquerque told me that he was concerned that as evaporation continues in cask, and as this wine is already pushing 21.5 percent alcohol, he didn’t want alcohol to exceed 22 percent, the permissible industry limit, so he stopped all oxidative and evaporate chemical reactions by transferring the aging wine from barrel to glass.).
Chris Blandy, head of the family business, told me that he aims to bottle all remaining stock of the 1920 Boal three years hence, in 2020, for the 100th anniversary of this wine, and then release it. Chris: Put me down for a 6-pack!
Blandy’s has arranged the small demi-johns, filled with the 1920 Boal, in a separate room, which they make sure visitors see on their tour:
For Madeira newbies: Demi-johns are not related to Demi Moore, but the wine held in these particular glass vessels still rates a 10! The 1920 Boal in these glass demi-johns will be bottled in 2020 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the wine.
Onto the afternoon tasting
All good things like lunch and camaraderie, must end… and work must begin anew; time to sweep through another group of impressive Madeiras.
Chris Blandy
Chris Blandy represents the 7th generation of his family to run the Blandy empire since it was established in 1811. He led our group tasting of 11 spectacular wines.
Here’s what we tasted with Chris.
Here’s another way of looking at what we tasted– the placemat before each of us.
While I had many favorites at the tasting, my top MVP award goes to this wine:
This Cossart Gordon (a Blandy’s label) 1987 Boal, which was bottled in 2016, spent 29 years in wood.
Although a baby, it presents a stunning mouthful of complexity and restraint. This is a gorgeous wine, an elegant wine. It shows a balance typically reserved for bank ledgers. Which is to say impeccable.
On the outskirts of Sao Jorge, a sleepy pastoral community, in late afternoon, we visited one of Blandy’s multi-varietal vineyards in which Sercial, Verdelho and Malvasia are planted.
Because Malvasia vines jump like pole beans in a single season (six feet or higher is not uncommon!), vines are trained to crown nets hung overhead, which are nine feet off the ground. The vines are kept at this height so that tractors can drive through the row while Malvasia vines remain suspended overhead. This overhead method of vine styling is known as latada.
The Blandy’s vineyard in Sao Jorge hugs a ravine, which hugs an undulating hill, which hugs the sea. A gorgeous part of the island.
Day 6
Here’s something we haven’t seen much on the island – much older wines still in barrel, like Malvasia from 1901, aging in this barrel at D’Oliveiras.
Imagine -- this wine has been aging in wood for 116 years and when it is finally transferred to bottle, it will still be youthful, fresh and juicy!
Madeira wine is such a nonsensical paradox of pleasure. The longer you keep it, the longer you abuse it with heat and exposure to air, and the more you move it around – the better it gets.
Luis D’Oliveira and his brothers run the winery, considered one of the island’s best Madeira producers. The family is D’Oliveira... the wine label reads D’Oliveiras, but they forgot to include an apostrophe. Just sayin’.... don’t want readers to think napaman has fallen asleep at the editing desk!
We met Luis D’Oliveira, responsible for sales and marketing, in a downtown Funchal warehouse, which dates back to 1619. Buildings here, like the wine produced in them, have unique longevity.
There is an explanation why D’Oliveiras wines have a richer, more concentrated texture and flavor profile than that produced by other houses on the island – and it stems from the winemaking process.
“We keep transferring aging wine into ever smaller barrels rather than top off larger barrels, or let too much oxygen depreciate wine in the barrel,” says Luis.
(When Madeira ages in an oak barrel, a certain percentage of evaporation occurs annually through cracks in the barrel. A three percent loss in volume annually through evaporation is common as large barrels are subjected to heat in summer months when the temperature of a canteiro can easily reach more than 100 F degrees.
Too much “head space” in a barrel might harm an aging wine, so some winemakers top-up low-fill barrels with the same wine from a spare barrel used for “topping-up.” But Luis’ family chooses, instead, to move the wine to a slightly smaller barrel, which the transferred wine will entirely fill.
In this fashion, for more than a century, wine like the 1901 Malvasia above, has been aging in a series of ever-decreasing-in-size barrels to keep the wine “fresh.” This process helps explain why D’Oliveiras wines have more stuffing, more concentration and more zip than wines produced elsewhere.
Roy Hersh and Luis D’Oliveira
I asked Luis how it came to be that, unlike so many other Madeira producers on the island, his firm has such a large inventory of older wines, many dating back to the mid-1850s.
“Both my grandfather and father were averse to ever exporting a single bottle of Madeira,” Luis said. “They outright refused to send Madeira overseas. And as there was such a small market here on the island, our family just amassed more and more wine!”
There is another, more commercial reason to explain the rich inventory held by D’Oliveiras today: the family has bought out five other producers over the decades and now is a single enterprise with six warehouses, many filled with the spoils of what Luis’ family acquired when they bought out a competitor.
The Super Bowl of Madeira Tastings
Roy Hersh says that in all his years of coming to Madeira and Portugal, he can’t remember ever having had as many wines in one day with the same producer.
Often, as I’ve noted above, a producer will put out between five to 15 glasses and pour examples of the different house styles, or ages, of wine. But Roy notes that he’s never tasted 32 wines in one day with one producer, as we experienced at D’Oliveiras.
In fact, there were so many wines to be sampled that we tasted 15 drier Madeiras in the morning session, took a break, had a two-hour lunch served with some exceptionally fine Portuguese wines, and then returned to the warehouse for an afternoon tasting session of 17 sweeter wines.
Luis helps present the wines for our tasting.
How compelling were the wines, which Luis served? Let’s frame the answer this way:
Sufficiently compelling that 13 people chose to sit in a warehouse basement with no windows on a sunny day on a gorgeous tropical isle so they could sip small glasses of amber elixir – and not one person wanted to speed up the tasting, or get out into the sunlight, or be somewhere else. For eight hours, Luis’ basement was a bunker of beatitude. We were each respectively, supremely grateful to have been able to spend the day here.
My list of favorites from the day-long tasting would double the length of this already-too-long report, so let me focus on just two highlights:
1928 D’Oliveiras Sercial. Bottled in 2008, when the wine was 80 years old. Aromas of freshly roasted espresso beans, mandarin oranges, and orange zest tweaked my nose and followed through on the palate. Peerless balance and a brilliant acidity, which stretched out the flavor components long after the swallow (this was not a wine to spit out!). My personal favorite, top wine of the tasting.
1875 D’Oliveiras Moscatel. Bottled in the late 1970s, when the wine was 100 years old. The bottle served to us was opened 18 days earlier to help bring some life to this oldster! What a tremendous beverage, filled with top notes of chocolate and bottom notes of cocoa; the finish was so long that if it were a ball game, it would have been into extra innings. Have we discovered the Holy Grail of Madeira? This could be it!
This will give you an idea of what we tasted in 8 hours at D’Oliveiras
Day 7
There’s a tiny corner of the island, which is so remote that you get to it by boat. See the image above? That little patch of 29 acres in the lower left corner, beneath cliffs of volcanic rock, a Shangri-La of sorts, is called Faja dos Padres.
Translated, it means “Fallen cliffs of the brothers (Jesuits).”
According to legend, Jesuit priests first settled this tiny corner of the island, planting fruit and vegetables in rich soil at the foot of the towering cliffs.
Today, the estate is owned by Mario Fernandes and his family, who tend 14 acres of fruit and vegetables, manage a 2-acre plot of mostly Malvasia grapes, and rent off-the-grid cottages for guests aiming to escape urbanity.
Mario not only looks like a weather-worn Anthony Quinn, he lives his life like a kind of Zorba the Greek himself. For decades, he has worked assiduously to turn this small patch of land into an Eden of bounty.
I asked Roy Hersh what makes this small patch of land so iconic in winemaking circles on the island.
"In 2006, I visited Madeira and tried to excite growers to replant Terrantez, one of the original grapes grown on the island. With encouragement, Mario propagated some old vine Terrantez and eventually wound up planting 500 vines on his farm in 2010," concludes Roy.
Faja dos Padres is an important site for Malvasia, too. Years ago, Mario discovered a single vine of Malvasia Candida n his farm, a particular clone of Malvasia that had long been thought extinct. Oenologists from the mainland descended on the property like ants on a picnic to verify the claim. It turns out that Mario was right.
Today, ALL Malvasia Candida growing on Madeira owes its rebirth to Mario’s discovery at Faja dos Padres.
Here’s how mature Malvasia vines are trained here; that’s our group walking beneath an arbor of Malvasia Candida growing overhead.
And here’s another one-off fact: This other, tiny plot of Malvasia, pictured below, holds a world record – these vines are planted in closest proximity to an ocean anywhere in the world! Here they are less than 10 yards from the Atlantic Ocean – think of it as a first down to a watery goal line.
Zorba, er, I mean Mario, walked us to his improvised cellar, where he crushes his grapes, where he let’s native yeasts inoculate crushed grapes and where he then cellars his wine to age; Mario used a hand-carved, bamboo reed to thieve a sample of his 2001 Malvasia Candida for us to taste. In a word – phenomenal!
Guests in the cottages, and Mario’s family itself, enjoy meals cooked by a professional chef on staff whose team daily harvests the fruits and vegetables grown on the farm.
Some of Faja dos Padres’ other inhabitants:
As we walked past a vineyard planted with Malvasia, I spotted one other inhabitant in this verdant paradise… but needed a macro lens to catch his antics…
Readers who are already hooked on Madeira, or for those who wish to learn more about this sensual beverage, or for those who want to seek out a source where to buy them at fair prices, should turn to the best source of Madeira in America: The Rare Wine Company, in California.
Check out their offerings for Madeira at rarewineco.com or send an email to their Madeira maven, Chris John, at [email protected]
For readers thinking about visiting Portugal, or Madeira, to study the wines of the region, there are no better tours than the ones organized by Roy Hersh, who lives outside Seattle.
Visit is site, http://www.fortheloveofport.com or send Roy an email expressing your interest to join him on one of his many planned vinous expeditions to Portugal or Madeira. You just might find napaman and Mrs. napaman on one of them!
Roy’s email is [email protected]
In closing, my favorite sign seen on the trip – found in the bistro café at Blandy’s. It says it all.
