Its large lodge in the centre of Funchal is testimony to its importance to the island and where, tonight, there will be more music, food, grape treading and, crucially wine drinking, although the majority of table wine drunk is from the Portuguese mainland. One of those British companies was Blandy’s, in business for more than 200 years, still owned by the same family and one of the small number of producers dominating the trade. Wines are barrel-aged and bottled with blends from different vintages, as with sherry.Īgain, like those other fortified wines, colonial era British traders and investors played a vital part in developing the Madeira trade and it became a fixture of the domestic wine cellar and dining table although as many know it from its use around the kitchen to deglaze pans to make delicious sauces – although it is nothing to do with the cake of the same name. And the grapes: the local tinto negra is the everyday backbone, but the finest wines tend to be made from the white grapes sercial, which is the driest, verdhelo, bual and malvasia, the sweetest. The grapes are grown on steep terraces on small plots around the island and hand picked because mechanical harvesting is impractical. That regular heat improved the quality of wine was also, legend has it, discovered by those ships ploughing through the tropics – the island was on the main trading routes of the British and Portuguese empires – and subsequently introduced to the wine making process itself using the island’s natural warm air or artificial heat, as the wine ages in oak casks. Indeed, it can last open, for many years, unopened for 100 years or more, still retaining freshness and vivacity derived from the volcanic soils. Like sherry and port, the young Madeira wines are fortified by grape spirit – deriving from the custom of adding brandy to wine barrels to prevent it deteriorating on long sea journeys – but unlike the others, Madeira does not become unpleasant to drink after the bottle has been opened for a few days. ![]() ![]() This distinctiveness comes in three ways: the island is overwhelmingly devoted to producing just this particular type of wine, with ancient techniques refined over centuries, making it the only wine that both improves in flavour from being heated and one that does not go off once the bottle is opened.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |