THE HISTORY OF MADEIRA WINE

Imagine travelling halfway around the world to sell something. Imagine getting there and not being able to find a buyer. Imagine having to cart your products all the way home after they’ve been exposed to the elements. Now imagine doing that in the 17th century when the only form of transport available was a ship at the mercy of storms, pirates and outbreaks of scurvy. Somehow, that turned out to be the exact process needed to create one of the world’s great wines.

Madeira wines were originally unfortified and often spoiled on long ocean voyages. The addition of distilled alcohol helped to prevent this on a one-way trip, but when the unsold shipment returned to Madeira, the producers found that the “spoilage” was what they’d been looking for all along. Thus began the era of 'Vinho da Roda', or “wine of the round voyage”.

Seeking to recreate the conditions that birthed the wine the world would come to love—but not having any idea how to actually do it without liter repeating the process—Madeira producers began sending barrels of wine on maritime adventures as ballast.

They eventually devised the 'estufagem' process, a method of heating that replicated the rigours of the tour. Today, two variations of the process are responsible for most Madeira. There’s the common 'cuba de calor', where the wine is produced quickly and cheaply by heating it in tanks, and 'canteiro', a rarer, slower method utilising only the heat of the sun to make the best Madeiras. A 'canteiro' Madeira can easily spend a century in its barrel.

Uniquely, the styles of Madeira are named after the grapes used to craft them. On the dry end of the scale, you have Sercial. You proceed through Verdelho and Bual before arriving at the sweetest style, Malvasia. Flavours and aromas run the gamut from dried fruit to what can be best described as walking into an antique store specialising in old furniture.

“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” so the saying goes, but those early winemakers couldn’t have possibly imagined how robust a product they were actually making. Paying a visit to 'Colheitas'’ Matthieu Delaunay, it’s hard to not be overawed by the wines in his chiller. The oldest Madeira in his collection is an 1875 D’Oliveiras Malvasia Reserva, which spent a staggering 140 years in a barrel before bottling.

It’s difficult to grasp how much time that is, but Delaunay puts it in context. “Even the children of the people who made this wine are dead,” he says, remembering that his great-grandmother was born within a decade of that vintage. Contemplating this, I realise why Madeira has been associated with history’s great minds—everyone from William Shakespeare to George Washington.

Knowing what it took to create it and how far it can travel through time, Madeira makes you reflect on your place in the world. Whether you’re an exalted statesman or a sea-toughened sailor sitting in the corner of a bar in Funchal, that’s something special.

By Kurt Ganapathy in "Esquire", Singapore, May 2016, excerpt p. 66. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.