Types Of Wine

Types Of Wine

The different tastes are either indicated by the above mentioned grape varieties or by levels of sweetness. Dry or seco indicates a dry taste in the fashion of Sercial. Medium dry or meio seco labels a mild taste like the Verdelho style. A taste like Bual is indicated with medium sweet or meio doce. The sweetest taste like Malmsey is named sweet or doce. You have to remember though, that the absence of a grape name usually indicates a lower quality wine made of Tinta Negra Mole.

As demonstrated in the chapter about the making of Madeira, most of the wine is blended. Therefore a three year old Madeira will only say that the youngest wine in this blend has an age of three years. Some by far older wines might be in it as well, to rounden the taste. In a solera the given year indicates the starting year of the solera. Only vintage Madeira’s will contain wine from one single year.

Blends

Rainwater

A bright and mild blend, said to taste like Verdelho. The main part is made from Tinta, the youngest wine in this blend is at least three years old. Rainwater is quite popular in the US as an aperitif.

 

Leacock's Rainwater

 

 

Three-Years-Old Reserve = Finest/Choice/Selected

This blend is normally made from Tinta. Thus a grape variety is not mentioned on the label. Instead you will find misleading words like Finest, Choice or Selected. The youngest wine in this blend is at least three years old.

Leacock’s St. John 3 year old blend

Five-Years-Old Reserve

This is where most of the producers start with the Castas Nobres. According to European Community regulations 15% can be of Tinta, the rest of the blend has to be from the named grape variety, the youngest wine being at least five years old.

 

Power Drury 5 year old blend

 

Ten-Years-Old Reserve = Special Reserve = Reserva Velha

Names a blend with the youngest wine being at least ten years old.

 

Rutherford & Miles 10 year old blend

 

Fifteen-Years-Old Reserve = Extra Reserve

A fifteen year old blend was not allowed by the original regulations. Nevertheless some producers make one anyway, sometimes for special occasions. The 15YO extra reserves by the Madeira Wine Company as an example celebrate the Portuguese discoveries or the bicentennial of the United States.

 

D’Oliveira 15 year old blend

Solera

In this type of wine you will find a solera system with some parallels to the making of Sherry or Malaga. The production of the early soleras went as follows: You take a tenth of the contents of a cask and replace it with the same amount of a younger wine. You can repeat this another nine times, until you changed the whole cask volume once. The solera will then be closed. Since a solera, operated in this fashion, can produce only little amounts of wine, many producers more and more turned to a solera system like in the Sherry region, where you can produce much more wine since you are allowed to refill younger wine as many times as you like. Modern soleras therefore do sometimes not seem to be as good as the old ones used to be.

Solera Madeira still is something special. The eleven different wines harmonize over the years and give a good mixture of the depth of old wines with some freshness of the younger wines. The year named on the bottle indicates the starting date of a solera. When you buy a solera 1852 only a small part of the bottle will be wine from the year 1852 but the other wines are of high age too. It has to be mentioned though, that solera wines are not allowed by the EU regulations, but you can still buy them on the island.

Leacock’s Malmsey Solera 1863

Vintage = Frasqueira

The top of Madeira wines is the vintage wine, also called Frasqueira. Wine of one variety and of one year is kept in cask for a minimum of twenty years and then for another two years in bottle. However these are just the minimum regulations. Most of the vintages will be in cask for much longer, sometimes over a century. The decision if a certain wine becomes a vintage is not made at the beginning. Usually it will have to spend at least ten years in cask to prove its quality, before it is declared as a vintage and kept in cask for more time to come. If the wine fails it will go into one of the many blends. The long storage in cask leads to a maximum oxidation and concentration of the wine. A vintage Madeira therefore offers a unique tasting experience. Vintages are very durable; a good vintage is able to live for centuries. On the island, but also from private collectors or on auctions you can find vintages dating back into the 18th century. In catalogues from 2001 I found two wines from 1789 and the famous 1795 Terrantez from Barbeitos. Even of the so-called 1792 Napoleon vintage - the wine that according to a popular fable Napoleon took with him into exile - there are some bottles still available. Bottles like these have its price of course, vintages of the 18th century are sold for more than a thousand dollars and will probably rise even more.

Borges’ Vintage Boal 1935

Colheita = Vintage With Less Then 20 Years In Cask

The classic vintage Madeira must spend at least twenty years in cask. A gap in regulations however allows the producers to make a vintage with less then twenty years of maturation in cask. Those wines also bear a year on the bottle but are far from being a vintage Madeira. They are good wines with much more individuality than a blend, but they certainly lack the concentration of a real vintage. More and more producers make these wines called Colheitas, among them Artur de Barros e Sousa Lda., Broadbent, Justino Henriques and Cossart Gordon. The price range is roughly between the 10 year old and 15 year old blends.

Cossart Gordon Colheitas

Alvada

Alvada is a new creation of the Madeira Wine Company, sold under the Blandy’s label. It is a five year old blend of Malmsey and Boal and comes in a quite shockingly modern labelled bottle. The bottle size is 0.5 litres.

Other Wines

In the high times of Madeira, shippers produced a number of curious wine-varieties. For tropical destinations, quinine was added to the wine, to use it as a medicine against tropical fevers especially Malaria. F. F. Ferraz traded this wine under the name Vinho Quinado. Another popular variety was the so-called White Madeira. The wine had been run through a charcoal filtering system so that most of its color (and taste) had been removed. The result, as an example traded by Gibbs & Co., was said to be light and elegant. Those varieties are no longer produced.

Ferraz’ vinho quinado

Forged Madeira wine, produced in times when the demand for Madeira was high, is also no longer marketed. The Canary islands and California were producers of forged Madeira.

Example of a forged California Madeira, made by the Los Angeles Wine Company. Picture shown with the friendly permission of Eleni Camperos

Malvasia dulce vintage of 2000 from Tenerife

Historic label of a Malvasia wine, seen in Tenerife

(left to right)