Madeira – Drinking History Part I: The Tip of the Volcanic Iceberg
“In the Sahara of the sea it is impossible to imagine a more grandiose oasis than Madeira”
Jules Verne, Package Holiday, 1907
There are many wines with a deep connection to history, but none can claim as ready and remote a link to generations past as the grand old wines of Madeira. This five hundred and fifty year old wine recalls the great age of exploration, the Renaissance, the dawn of capitalism, and the beginnings of trade with the Americas and India when sailors challenged the wild waters of the Atlantic in search of fortune. It also whispers of a darker period of slave labour, the rarely-told story that links so many traditional wine regions. Madeira has seen it all.
Known for its legendary longevity, casks and bottles of madeira dating back to the late 18th century still rest in the lodges of Funchal, and in no small measure. I’d wager that the island has greater stocks of century old wines than anywhere else on earth. For a sum, visitors can literally taste the history of the island.
And yet the unique terroir and wine growing culture that gives rise to these precious wines was very nearly lost. By the early 1980s, the wine of Madeira - the same wine used to toast the signing of the American declaration of Independence - was nearing extinction, having fallen victim to innumerable misfortunes. Most regarded madeira as a cheap cooking wine. If not for Portugal’s entry into the European Union in 1986, and the concerted effort to rescue the island’s impossibly steep, terraced vineyards and subsidize the thoroughly uneconomical ageing requirements for true madeira, I would be writing a different story. Fortunately, under the watchful eyes of the Madeira Wine Institute, an industry organization that regulates all aspects of production from grapes to bottle, quality has risen dramatically. Producers have realized that only great wine can safeguard the island’s prospects. The pleasure of future generations – our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, seems happily assured.
A near-permanent array of fluffy white clouds, and a few ominous dark ones, cover the craggy peaks of the interior of Madeira, as though Velcro-ed to the heavily forested mountainsides. At just 741 km2 (286 sq mi), the island doesn’t have enough landmass to generate sufficient warm air to float the clouds higher. Cooled and moistened, Madeira enjoys perfect conditions for laurissilva, the subtropical, evergreen cloud forests that once covered most of Europe before the last ice age. It is this climate and flora that determines a style of wine quite unlike any other, where barely ripe grapes are transformed by ingenious methods into the most long-lived wines on earth.
Like many visitors, I quickly understand the importance of a powerful engine and four-wheel drive, as I set off to better understand the singularity of the island and its grapes. Level ground on Madeira is a rare commodity. Even the so-called paseo marítimo, the seaside promenade that runs from Funchal to Câmara de Lobos on the south shore, rises and falls as steeply as the stormy Atlantic.
The island is nothing more than the tip of a volcanic iceberg, the top of which juts sharply out of the sea while the sides plummet as abruptly into the marine abyss. Between Madeira and nearby Porto Santo, the only other inhabited island in this mini mid-Atlantic archipelago, the sea is over two kilometers deep. This fact contributes to the island’s rich diversity of fish, not to mention dolphins and whales. The island’s exposed rock has been eroding for over 18 million years since the first volcanic activity created the island, cutting steep valleys at semi-regular intervals over the island’s 57 kilometer length and 22 kilometer width.
The weathering of this volcanic rock has also yielded Madeira’s famously fertile soils. Farmers, for example, are known to get three crops of potatoes per year instead of the two typical on mainland Portugal. The vigorous soil is also partly responsible for Madeira’s rather prolific vineyards, with maximum permitted yields set at a staggering 150hl/ha, three times the average for quality vineyards elsewhere. But, as we shall see, madeira is more a wine of process than vineyard, and high yields and lower ripeness are indeed desirable.
From Funchal, Madeira’s capital and only real city, we climb eastward in our jeep, steeply and frighteningly, over 580 meters to Cabo Girão above Câmara de Lobos. This is Europe’s highest, and the world’s 2nd highest sea cliff that plunges straight into the frothy Atlantic below. Meaning “Cape Turn Around”, this is where the first Portuguese sailors who fell upon the uninhabited island in 1419 decided they had seen enough, and about-faced back to Lisbon to tell the King of their discovery. By the following year, “Madeira”, literally “wood” owing to its dense forests, was a Portuguese protectorate populated by noble families from the Minho region in northern Portugal, as well as tradesmen and convicts.
Strategically located in the North Atlantic Ocean (32°38′49.96″N), about a thousand kilometers from the mainland (a one and a half hour flight from Lisbon) and five hundred kilometers from the coast of Morocco on Greenwich Mean Time, Madeira quickly became one of the world’s most important ports. It was used as a staging and replenishing point for ships headed to both the East Indies and the Americas for trade and discovery.
In the earliest days, Madeira was also a major supplier of sugar to Europe. Sugarcane, brought originally from Sicily, was the island’s most important crop and the main source of wealth earned by the first settlers in the 15th and 16th century. Within a few decades of its discovery, tiny Madeira was the world’s largest sugar producer, feeding the sweet tooth of Portugal and the rest of Europe.
Rampant deforestation to fuel the boilers, and cheaper exports from Brazil would later cause the first great boom-bust of emergent capitalism. Sugar output had dropped 90% by 1530. But a new product would soon set the island back on the path to economic recovery: wine. Vineyards soon replaced most sugarcane plantations, and the product of what remained was transformed from refined to distilled form. It would be the combination of wine and sugarcane spirit that would transform madeira wine into the ultimate sea-worthy beverage, which in turn would eventually carry Madeira’s name to the four corners of the earth and ensure the worldwide fame of this tiny volcanic rock in the Atlantic.
João, our guide and driver from the tour company Mountain Expeditions, stops at a roadside tavern midway between the north and south coasts for a little taste of this important history. Although sugarcane is a very minor crop these days, and it’s no longer used to fortify wine, a handful of local producers continue to distill a rough and ready white rum from it, and more rarely, aged rum. This aguardente de cana is the base for the island’s unofficial cocktail called “poncha”, a mixture of sugar and/or honey, fruit juice and the powerful, rustic rum. I opt for the poncha à pescador, the traditional, fortifying morning beverage of fishermen in the village of Câmara dos Lobos. This version is made with lemon juice and a generous dose of spirit, a true sweet-sour-strong punch, though more gentle versions from passion fruit and other exotic fruits are popular.
Fortified by the poncha, we head inland and further up into the cloudy center of the island. Along the way, cascading down the steep ravines running out to the coast are a series of near-continuous, narrow green terraces called “poios”, punctuated by the terra cotta roofs and white walls of houses clinging to the hillsides. Virtually every square meter of land has been commissioned to produce vegetables, bananas, grains, sugarcane, and, mostly above three hundred meters, grapes. It’s recorded that the early settlers on Madeira had had to torch large tracks of dense forests to make room for housing and agriculture, triggering fires that burned out of control. Some legends have it that the island burned for seven straight years and forests nearly wiped out, an exaggeration no doubt as there is plenty of original forest left inland. But it’s not hard to see how the challenging topography would have encouraged such drastic measures to clear land. Ironically, the ash from the massive forest fires would also contributed to soil fertility, a boon for early farmers.
The poios themselves are a testament to the indomitable nature of humans and their dogged determination, made possible by thousands of slaves brought from the Canary Islands and Africa. Each narrow strip of sloping land is held in place by dry stonewalls to prevent precious soil from washing down to the sea - surely a monumental effort to build - and indeed much of the soil had to be brought from other parts of the island to complete the terraces.
Each small plot is meticulously cultivated, all by hand, of course. During my stay on the island I see not a single tractor. In fact, there are not even any real vineyard expanses. Most land remains in the hands of smallholders, and all of the island’s wine producers without exception purchase grapes. It’s telling that an estimated 1500 growers (nobody knows for sure) cultivate just 450 or so hectares of vineyards for the production of PDO Madeira, making the average holding barely one-third of a hectare. And even that land is often further split among non-contiguous parcels. “I issue 600-700 cheques each year after harvest”, Humberto Jardim would later tell me, the managing director of Henriques & Henriques, referring to the growers from which the company buys grapes. And H&H is not even the largest producer.
Considering the small allocation of arable land per household, it’s not surprising that locals have adopted a form of vineyard trellising that maximizes land use. Latada, the name given to this traditional pergola-like system, is a lattice of horizontal wires supported by wooden stakes on which vines are trained, creating a roof of shoots and leaves parallel to the ground. The height of the pergola, ranging from about one to two meters, depends on the elevation of the vineyard: the higher up, the lower the pergola to the ground. This helps to regulate ripening, as average temperatures drop as you move up hillsides, and grapes trained closer to the ground benefit from the stored and reflected heat off soil and stones. Vines, mainly of the sercial variety planted at the very highest viable elevations nearing 800 meters, are grown practically on the ground, a system called vinha do chão (literally: “vine of the ground”) to get that critical ripening nudge.
Additionally, latadas allow airflow under the canopy to mitigate the high disease pressure of Madeira’s warm, moist climate. But the real advantage for farmers is that latadas also allow for other crops to be planted underneath grapevines – cabbage, beans, potatoes, carrots, onion and myriad other garden vegetables are often cultivated on the same plots. Virtually no Madeiran farmer lives exclusively from grapes, and the vast majority of these tiny plots double as home vegetable gardens. And like vegetables, a small percentage of grapes are used for home consumption – home winemaking that is – while the rest is sold to one or more of the commercial producers for extra income.
We continue our journey to the interior and marvel at another feat of engineering on the island, the complex and extensive system of irrigation channels called levadas, from “levar”, meaning to carry. Aside from dense vegetation and mountainous terrain, water availability was another obstacle to viable farming. Despite generous rainfall overall, the distribution is uneven. As on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, the moisture-bearing prevailing winds arrive from the northeast and slam into the steep cliffs on the north side of Madeira where they drop their load, some 3000mm of rain yearly. The hills on the south side receive only about half that amount, while the lower south coast where the majority of people live sees a scant 500mm yearly.
Water for irrigating crops and vineyards is thus redistributed from north to south through an ingenious network of over 2500 kilometers of mini-aquaducts that crisscross the island, built in beginning in the 16th century – again by slave labour - and still in use today. Small doors along the canals are opened and closed as needed to flood-irrigate parcels of land. Water is also channeled into reservoirs for drinking as well as, in more recent times, to power hydroelectric turbines, supplying much of the island’s energy needs.
The levadas have had another unexpected use that their 16th century engineers surely didn’t anticipate: a draw for tourists. Flanked by maintenance paths hacked out of mountainsides by pickaxe, the levadas have become a mecca for walkers and hikers. Tourism is, after all, the main economic driver for Madeira, and levada walks, especially the segments that run through the UNESCO-protected laurissilva forests that cover two-thirds of the island, is the number one activity. Each year over a million tourists mainly from the UK and northern Europe - four times the permanent population of the island - visit the island for eco-adventures. Aside from hiking, they come for bird, dolphin and whale watching, canyoning, paragliding, and repelling, among other more vigorous activities. The less adventurous opt for garden tours and wine tastings, or simply enjoy the pleasant year-round climate that fluctuates between a comfortable 15ºC and 25ºC.
It does get noticeably cooler as we reach the north side of the island around São Vicente, one of the main winegrowing villages. The landscape also seems somehow sharper. The sea is noticeably rougher, whipped up by north Atlantic winds, the mountains more rugged and angular, and the ravines and valleys and the vineyards that cling to them that much steeper. Here, the most exposed parcels of vines, buffeted by the constant salty sea winds, are protected by windbreaks made of bundled branches called bardos de urze, from the laurissilva forests. It’s extreme viticulture to be sure, and one wonders why anyone would bother farming this land. The most common answer these days is, of course, tradition.
Although one would assume that the grapes grown on the cooler, wetter north side of the island would be tangier and less ripe, paradoxically, the average ripeness is higher. Juan Teixeira of Justino’s explains that the typical polyculture practiced on the south side has the unexpected effect of increasing grapes yields, since the land is constantly fertilized and watered throughout the year for crops other than grapes. And, as virtually everywhere else on the planet, higher yields result in lower average ripeness. Fewer inhabitants on the north side means less pressure on land use, and thus many parcels are dedicated to vines alone. And the even steeper topography also makes combined grape and vegetable farming less practical. The net result is vineyards with lower yields and higher degrees of ripeness.
We continue our drive west from São Vicente along the sea under cliffs and terraced vineyards towards Porto Moniz, following the recently completed highway that very nearly circumnavigates the island. The road darts in and out of countless tunnels bored through the steep ridges, running roughly parallel to the old narrow one-lane highway that hangs precariously on the outside of the near-vertical green cliffs.
João aptly likens the island to Swiss cheese. But the importance of the new highway is deadly serious. It has quite literally changed the pace of life on Madeira. Barely more than a dozen years ago, before the modern roads were completed, every point on the island was that much more isolated. It used to take several hours to cross from south to north on a tortuously rough road, for example, now it’s less than a half hour’s drive.
It was also much more dangerous, as the occasional car was reported to have been knocked over the edge by falling chunks of basalt. Most stretches of the old road, spectacular as the views may be, are now closed. Many credit the recent boom in tourism to the modern infrastructure. In particular, the runway extension built in 2000 at the infamous local airport has made Madeira that much safer to visit.
But there’s something odd about the new roads. As we drive through several tunnels, I notice that in places the asphalt is rippled like corduroy. Why are these recent road projects as rough as old country lanes? The answer, I’m told, is buckling caused by pressure from gases beneath the road. Although the last volcanic activity on Madeira occurred about 6,500 years ago, and the volcano is believed to be extinct, engineers discovered the trapped gases while digging the tunnels. Presumably, the gases emanate from deep within the island. Perhaps Madeira is just slumbering after all.
João later drops me off at the Madeira Wine Institute’s head office in downtown Funchal where I round out the day with a tasting of vintage madeiras. The Institute (or more correctly IVBAM), controls production from vineyards to bottle. Nowhere else in the world have I seen such stringent controls over wine production. Neither a bunch of grapes nor a drop of wine moves without the institute’s knowledge and approval.
The wines are lined up by Rubina Viera, the head of the institute’s tasting panel, who ultimately grants or denies approval to every wine bearing the Madeira appellation. It’s a lesson in madeira’s most striking characteristic: longevity. I quickly understand that these wines defy time, that they’re practically indestructible. They have already, after all, been cooked and oxidized – the two greatest fears of winemakers everywhere else in the world - before even making it to bottle. Thus they undergo little further development in the relative safety of their glass houses.
In addition, madeira has invariably searing acidity, which acts as an efficient preservative. It’s a function of cloud cover, the threat of autumn rains that leads to early harvest, and the particular chemistry of Madeira’s volcanic soils. Soils on the island are deficient in potassium, an element that buffers (lowers) acidity, leading to unusually low pH (highly acid) wines. The fortifying process also inhibits the transformation of harsh malic acid into lactic acid that many other wines purposely undergo, further accentuating the acidic but life-preserving character.
The wines we taste range from 1996, the youngest, back to 1862, a wine, incidentally, that had recently been submitted to the Institute for bottling approval. I’m struck first by the range of hues, a near-monochrome but infinitely nuanced palette of walnuts, mochas, tans and ambers, and as the wines get older, a distinctly green-tinged rim. The unusual rim colour, Viera explains, is the result of the interaction between colour pigments, tannins and low pH in the wines that causes reflection in the green spectrum over time.
Then there’s of course the astonishing spectrum of aromas and flavours. The possible analogies are limited only by my imagination and experience. Is it burnt orange, iodine, or candle wax? Black pepper, maple syrup, curry spice, fresh cigar, hay, balsamic vinegar or white glue? One young terrantez from 1988 reminds me of Christmas eve, redolent of vanilla, cinnamon, dried fruit and nuts, while another could be bottled for soothing aromatherapy in a room with tropical forest imagery. Ultimately, words are utterly inadequate.
But one paradoxical aspect strikes me in particular: unlike most other wines on the planet, which turn smooth and mellow with age, madeira grows more fiery. Then again, most other wines grow old in bottle, in the absence of oxygen and with the liquid trapped inside, whereas vintage madeira grows old in cask – over 20 years at least, and often much longer. Thus it becomes hyper-concentrated, as the sweet angel’s share evaporates over the years through porous wood and oxygen ravages the remaining fruit, leaving only the reduced, resolute essence. Acids sharpen and sweetness fades, making the wine more challenging, less immediately likeable in the pure hedonistic sense. Eventually it grows cantankerous, like a cranky old man. But believe me, it’s an irresistible character you’ll want to visit time and again.
Text and Photos by John Szabo, MS