Since there's so much range, one thing I hope we see more are multi-varietal blends, in the mold of Blandy's Alvada. Something in between verdelho and bual would probably be just right for me. Monday, April 13, I just finished reading Alex Liddell's Madeira: The Mid-Atlantic Wine and wanted to make a list of the salient ideas in the book as a reference for myself and others. Besides having a love of madeira in cocktails , the restaurant I work in, Loyal Nine, has an interest in madeira due to the wine's Colonial history and thus we offer flights of the four noble varieties.
While there are a lot of common table wines grown on the island, most of the interest is focused on the aged and fortified variety. At first, the wines produced a high enough acidity and alcohol content on their own to make it over on the hot, spoil-inducing voyage to the American colonies, but later fortification with distilled spirits became the norm starting around the s.
British restriction on the American colonies made madeira rather popular; the British banned all European products unless they were brought over on British ships leaving British ports.
Madeira, however, despite being under Portuguese control, is an island closer to the shores of Africa than Europe and was exempt from these restrictions.
More modern madeira production mimics the long, expensive process of being kept in hot ships' holds through heating the wine via a process called estufagem. Whether modern steam-jacketed heated tanks or more classical casks left in hot parts of buildings, this cooking process converts the wine into something almost unspoilable and capable of long aging. In fact, the author includes his tasting notes on late 18th century madeiras that were often spectacular although some had crashed over the years due to poor storage or other issues.
