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Hello! I am Erin Collins from Vintages Wine & Spirits in Colorado Springs and we are talking about an introduction to Madeira.
The island of Madeira gives its name to the only wine in the world that must be baked in an oven.
There is a fortified wine from the Madeira Islands of Portugal and it is made in several styles, from a dry style to be served on its own or appetite to a sweet style to be served with dessert. It has a very unique fermentation process making it quite long-lived. In fact, there is Madeira’s we are still drinking from the 1800s.
The vinification process of Madeira consists of subjecting the wine to high temperatures for a period of some months in buildings called estufas designed specifically for this purpose. The process is meant to duplicate the effect of long voyages of aging barrels through tropical climates starting in the 1400s.
The temperature of the estufas range from 100 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The lower the temperature just creates a longer process of this modernization making for smoother mellower wines. It is like a mild kind of pasteurization. Furthermore, they deliberately expose the wine to oxygen oxidizing the wine creating a really long-lived wine that is similar in color to a tiny port.
Exposure to these extreme temperatures and oxygen also create the stabilities so that once the bottle is opened, it will last a long time. It already had the oxygen exposure so it will not affect the wine once it is opened. It will last then you are covered for years.
There are four major great varieties used in Madeira, from sweetest to driest, there is Malvasia, Bual, Verdelho, and Sercial. The main grape they use is of course is Tinta Negra Mole.
Madeira is either as a vintage, which means it needs to be from cask over 20 years or blended three, five, 10 and 15-year-old. Originally, Madeira was not fortified. Now, they fortified Madeira to make it more stable. This is a process of pouring brandy in during the fermentation process while the wine is typically sweet and stopping the fermentation maintaining a high level of alcohol and sweet wine.
Madeira was an important wine in the history of the United States of America. No quality wine grapes could be grown in the 13 colonies, so imports were needed with the great focus on Madeira because it transported so well.
One of the major events of the road to the Revolution, in which Madeira played the key role, was the British seizure of John Hancock sloop to Liberty in 1768. Dispute over the imports on duties arose and the seizures at Liberty cause riots to erupt among the people of Boston.
Madeira was also a favorite of Thomas Jefferson and used to toast the declaration of Independence. A final illustration in Madeira’s accidental creation is in the 1700s in Savanna, Georgia, a shipment was accidentally left on the beach to absorb lots of rain during the rainy season. The people of Savanna loved the wine and demanded it again and they had to come up a way to create rainwater Madeira which is now shipped only to United States.
That is our story on Madeira. Thank you for watching.
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