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Madeira Portugal Wine region
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Portugal: Madeira
In the Atlantic 400 miles due west of the Moroccan coast and 625 miles from the Portuguese mainland lies the sub-tropical island of Madeira, discovered in the fifteenth century. Madeira DOC wines are cousins of other Portuguese wines but really deserve a category all to themselves. The capital Funchal has been heavily trafficked since the age of exploration, and as in the Douro, its trading history has created its finest products.
Like port, Madeira wines are sweet and fortified with brandy, but their unusually high acidity makes them the world's longest-lived. The finest can even be stored upright without risk of oxidation. These are the wines that traders first discovered improved with the protracted aging required on merchant sailing ships. Colonial era consumers created a fad for them, and were willing to pay higher prices for wines that had made the round trip sea voyage rather than being aged on the island.
The mellowness they appreciated in these Madeiras was created by gentle equatorial warmth over a long period, and since the beginning of the twentieth century, when ship travel became too costly, vintners have substituted other systems of "cooking" (estufagem) the wine for the same effect. The most basic entails heating the wine with stainless steel coils in concrete tanks (cubas de calor) as large as 13,200 gallons to a temperature of 40-50�� C.(122�� F.) for at least three months. As with Tawny Port, aging in Madeira is an indicator of quality, and the finer the wine, the more extended the cask age. Gentler estufagem treatments for finer quality wines use smaller casks (600 liters/158 gallons) and longer time in "warm rooms" (armazens de calor) heated by steam pipes, or simply extended natural outdoor heat under the eaves of the lodges of Funchal. The latter vinhos de canteiro, the most rarefied, age in their casks for a minimum of twenty years.
Lesser Madeiras use large amounts of the basic white Tinta Negra Mole grape, while the better quality ones use the traditional "noble" varieties Sercial, Verdelho, Bual and Malmsey (Malvasia), in accordance with Madeira Wine Institute regulations. Though in earlier years producers had more leeway, since 1993 the European Union rule requires any bottle listing a noble varietal to contain a minimum of 85 percent of the indicated variety and to eliminate the Tinta Negra Mole completely.
