Know your Malvasia - Malmsey (Malvasia Branca de São Jorge), Madeira, Portugal

What are we talking about when we talk about Malvasia?  This can be a frustrating question to answer, and many of the sources we would turn to in order to help us understand Malvasia actually aren't much help at all.  Most sources, like Oz Clarke's Grapes and Wines and Wikipedia, consider Malvasia as a family of grapes or, even worse, as a series of "sub-varieties" that all basically roll up into a single thing called "Malvasia."  Before we go too much farther, I would like to take this opportunity to implore you, if you have ever used the phrase "sub-variety" to describe a grape, to please discontinue this practice and strike these words from your vocabulary.  Properly speaking, there really isn't any such thing as a sub-variety.  There are grape varieties and there are clonal variants of these varieties, but there is no such thing as a sub-variety.  Much of the confusion over sub-varieties comes, I think, from grape "families" like Malvasia, Trebbiano or Lambrusco, where there are a handful of different grapes that all have the same first word in their names, but different second words.  The easy conclusion to jump to is that these are all basically the same grape, and they are just different enough to require a second word to differentiate them from one another, but are basically so similar that we are best served by thinking of them as a single group.  This is absolutely not the case, and today I'd like to start a new series on this blog called Know Your Malvasia, where I'll be taking a look at different Malvasia-named grapes to see what we're really talking about when we talk about a particular Malvasia.  The series will stretch out into Know Your Lambrusco and Know Your Trebbiano as well, so stayed tuned for that.

Malvasia is perhaps the most difficult grape to get a good handle on because while there are definitely named  varieties of Malvasia that some wine drinkers are familiar with (such as Malvasia Nera or Malvasia Fina), for the most part, when you come across a wine made from the Malvasia grape, you are only ever given the word "Malvasia" to go on.  The most commonly planted Malvasia in Italy is Malvasia Bianca di Candia, which can be found virtually everywhere throughout the country.  To make matters worse, though, there are specific varieties of Malvasia that can be found in specific regions of Italy, and these varieties aren't always differentiated from Malvasia Candia.  In Tuscany, you've got with Malvasia Bianca Lunga while in Lazio, you're usually dealing with Malvazia del Lazio (for white wines, anyway).  Malvazia del Lazio is actually related to the Muscat family of grapes (literally, as it is an offspring of Muscat of Alexandria), but Malvazia Bianca Lunga is more closely related to other Malvasias like Malvasia Nera di Brindisi, Malvasia di Lipari and Malvazija Istarska, though all of these are separate varieties and are in no way "sub-varieties" of any grape.  Worst of all, Malvasia Bianca di Candia doesn't seem to be related to any of the other Malvasia varieties, including Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, but rather has a parent-offspring relationship with Garganega, of all things!

Once you get all of the above straightened out, you still have to deal with the rest of the world, since there are a handful of Malvasia-named grapes grapes in Slovenia and Croatia as well as a few in France and Spain as well.  Portugal probably comes in second in the race for Malvasia confusion, as they have Malvasia Fina (which we learned is actually the Boal grape from Madeira), Malvasia de Colares, and Malvasia Preta, none of which are related to one another or to the other Malvasia-named wines in other parts of the world.  The most well-known Malvasia-named wine in Portugal, though, is actually not generally known as Malvasia at all.  Rather it is known as Malmsey, and it is the sweetest of the four noble Madeira styles (which are, from driest to sweetest, Sercial, Boal, Verdelho and Malmsey).  Virtually every Madeira source that I've read simply indicates that Malmsey is made from Malvasia grapes, but as I hope we've seen by now, that's really not a very useful distinction.  After all, Boal is technically also made from Malvasia grapes, since one of Boal's synonyms is Malvasia Fina.   What are we talking about when we talk about Malmsey Madeira?

The answer is, as you might expect, a little complicated.  In the 15th Century, Malvasia Cândida (which is not the same as Malvasia Bianca di Canida or Malvasia di Candia Aromatico), which is in fact the same as the Malvasia di Lipari grown in Sicily (which we'll examine in a few weeks), was introduced to the island of Madeira and for many centuries, this was the grape used to produce the wines labeled as Malmsey.  For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Malvasia Cândida declined in popularity through the years and today there are only about 10 acres of it left on the island of Madeira.  In the 1970's, a new grape called Malvasia Branca de São Jorge was introduced to the island.  This grape was created by José Leão Ferreira de Almeida at an agricultural research station near Lisbon from two unknown parents and was first cultivated in the parish of São Jorge on the northern coast of Madeira.  There are about 86 acres of Malvasia Branca de São Jorge currently planted on Madeira and it is now the dominant grape used for production of wines labeled as Malmsey.  So, as a general rule of thumb, wines labeled Malmsey from prior to 1970 or so are probably mostly Malvasia Cândida, while wines made after 1970 are probably Malvasia Branca de São Jorge.

Which brings us to today's wine, which is the NV Rare Wine Company New York Malmsey ($40).  I can't say for sure what grape or grapes were used to create this, but my best guess is that it's probably mostly Malvasia Branca de São Jorge.  In the glass the wine was a fairly dark tawny-brown color.  The nose was fairly intense with aromas of burnt sugar, raisins, caramel, prunes and smoke.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  It was very sweet with flavors of smoky scorched sugar, prunes, raisins, toasted nuts and a touch of fresh green apple.  The alcohol was pretty noticeable in this wine, much more so than in the other three Madeira styles I tried from this producer (Sercial, Boal, Verdelho), which made the wine a bit more awkward than some of the others.  It was a very nice wine, but it was probably my least favorite of this series of wines mostly because I just felt like it wasn't quite as well balanced as some of the others.  I'd be curious to try an older vintage version alongside a newer vintage to see what kind of difference the change in grape variety makes.

Loureiro - Ponte de Lima, Vinho Verde, Portugal

When my buddy Joe over at Curtis Liquors first told me that he had a Vinho Verde wine that was made from 100% Loureiro grapes, I did a bit quick research on my phone and told him I wasn't interested.  You see, the Wikipedia page for Loureira (which is the name of Loureiro Blanco in Spain) said that Loureiro is also known as Arinto and since I already had a wine made from the Arinto grape, I didn't think it was necessary to pick this one up as well.  At the time, I had no idea that Arinto is actually used as a synonym for a wide range of grapes, most of which are not related to one another at all.  When I went to write my post on Arinto, I discovered that the wine that I had was made from Arinto de Bucelas grapes, which are very different from and completely unrelated to Loureiro grapes.  Luckily, Joe still had a few bottles of the Loureiro wine when I went back for it, so I picked a bottle up.

Loureiro is one of those grapes that many have probably had before, but may not be aware of it.  It is planted on about 6,000 acres of land in Portugal, most of which are in the northern part of the country in and around the Vinho Verde region.  As you can tell from the Vinho Verde website, there are a lot of different grapes that can be used to produce Vinho Verde wine, and most bottles that I've come across give no indication of which grapes make up the finished wine.  As I've mentioned previously (in my very first post on a Portuguese wine, as a matter of fact), Portuguese wines are often blends and since most consumers (at least most American consumers) aren't familiar with the several hundred different grapes that Portugal is home to, the Portuguese producers and their American importers/distributors don't see much reason to indicate a given wine's cépage anywhere on the label.  The average wine drinker who has enjoyed a few different Portuguese wines in his/her lifetime may have sampled more than a dozen different grapes, but also may have no idea what any of them were.

All of which is to say that Portuguese grapes have a tendency to appear more rare than they actually are.  Varietal wines are becoming more popular in Portugal, but most wines made there today are still blends, and since Loureiro is predominantly a Portuguese grape, it generally finds itself in various blends as well.  It is an assertively perfumed and flavored grape, as you may have guessed if you're fluent in Portuguese or one of the other Romance languages.  Loureiro comes from the word meaning "laurel" and the name was given to the grape because of the laurel scent and flavor that the grapes can have.*  It can be aggressively aromatic in other ways, too, and this is often cut by blending with Arinto, Trajadura, or any of the other white grapes in northern Portugal.

Loureiro is also grown in northwestern Spain, where, as mentioned above, it is generally known as Loureira. It covers about 1,400 acres of ground in Spain, and is actually blended more often there than in Portugal.  Loureiro's blending partners in Spain are typically Albariño (which shares enough DNA with Loureiro to make it possible that the two grapes are related, though the exact nature of that relationship hasn't been fully explored or uncovered [citation 1]), Treixadura (Trajadura in Portugal) and/or Godello.  There's also a very rare, nearly extinct Spanish grape called Loureiro Tinto found in northwestern Spain that some have thought may be a color mutation of Loureiro, but it doesn't appear as though the necessary testing has been done to confirm or deny this.  Loureiro Tinto is also sometimes used as a synonym for the Mencía grape, but no genetic connection has been found between Loureiro Blanco and Mencía either.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2009 Quinta do Ameal Loureiro from my friends at Curtis Liquors for around $15.  This wine is 100% Loureiro from the Lima sub-region of Vinho Verde in northern Portugal.  In the glass, the wine was a fairly light silvery lemon color.  The nose was fairly intense with pear, lemon, bay leaf and apricot aromas.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of apricot, lime, pear, bay leaf and citrus peel along with a nice stony minerality on the finish.  Many wines from Vinho Verde are light, spritzy, ethereal little things that are difficult to remember a few minutes after finishing and if you're in the market for a wine like that, you should probably pass this one by.  This was much more substantial than most Vinho Verde wines and resembled Riesling more than Twin Vines.  I thought it was an absolutely stellar wine, especially at the price point, and believe it would be a big hit with a variety of foods, especially seafoods that you may traditionally think are too heavy or assertively flavored for a light Vinho Verde.

*Think you don't know what laurel smells like?  Open your spice cabinet and open up the jar of bay leaves you keep in the back and hardly ever use.  Bay leaves come from the bay laurel tree, so the smell of bay leaves is the smell of laurel.  It seems odd that the plant used to crown the first Olympic champions in ancient Greece and the plant that is still used to designate positions of honor (think Nobel and Poet Laureates) is now relegated to the status of a pantry staple that no one is quite sure what to do with, but what can you do?

CITATIONS

1) Ibáñez, J., M.T. de Andrés, A. Molino, and J. Borrego. 2003. Genetic study of key Spanish grapevine varieties using microsatellite analysis. Am. J. Enol. Vitic. 54:22-30.

Boal/Bual/Gual/Malvasia Fina - Madeira, Portugal and Canary Islands, Spain

When I decided to try and write about each of the major Madeira grapes, I really wasn't anticipating any problems or confusion.  Everything I had read said that there were four major grapes that produced four different styles of Madeira.  Easy peasy.  I got through two of the four major grapes, Sercial and Verdelho, with little problem, but then I came up against Boal, and things started to get a little dicey.  It turns out that there are a handful of grapes that are called Boal or Bual and unless you are familiar with some of the recent legislation regarding grape names in Portugal, you may be misled in your search for information about the Boal of Madeira.  You might be inclined, as I was at first, to think that Boal Branco is the grape you're after...after all, it does list Boal de Madere as one of its synonyms.  It turns out that Boal Branco, which is sometimes used a synonym for Sémillon in the Douro Valley, is actually a very obscure grape that is hardly cultivated any more (at least according to Wine Grapes, the massive new grape book from Jancis Robinson & Co. that I hope to review very shortly).

If you're looking for Boal, you actually need to start looking in that tangled web of grapes that is the Malvasia "family."  I have "family" in scare quotes, because it turns out that many of the grapes called Malvasia Something are actually not related to one another at all.  The story goes that these grapes are ultimately named for the port of Monemvasia in Greece, which was at one time (many hundreds of years ago) a major hub for wine commerce.  There were many different sweet wines coming out of the port of Monemvasia, and it is thought that the place name became a kind of substitute for the grape name and many of the wines being shipped out of there just came to be called vinum de Malvasias or some variant of that.  Before the heyday of ampelography (and, more recently, DNA analysis), it was probably the case that any grape making wines similar in style to these wine were called Malvasia, regardless of whether they were related to any of the grapes making the wines coming out of Monemvasia or not.  Wines with "Malvasia" somewhere in their name are genetically and geographically diverse, which would seem to lend credence to a stylistic basis for the common root rather than a genetic one.  Malvasia grapes are especially common in Italy, Spain and Portugal and there have been numerous studies done to try and see how they are (or are not) related to one another.  Many of the Malvasias do have some kind of genetic connection, but there are others that are obvious outliers, so if we speak of Malvasia as a family, we really are only doing so in a linguistic sense.

All of which is wonderful, but what does any of this have to do with Boal, you may be asking.  Well, in the year 2000, the Portuguese authorities officially renamed the Boal/Bual grape Malvasia Fina (Boal is the Portuguese name while Bual is the Anglicization of it...remember that Madeira was a British dominated market for a very long time and the British apparently had a tough time with the "oa" diphthong  so they changed it to "ua"...go figure).  This wasn't done on a whim, but rather based on genetic and ampelographic information that showed that these two grapes were actually one and the same (and also showed that Malvasia Fina had a parent/offspring relationship with another grape known as Boal Ratinho).  Malvasia Fina is one of the Portuguese specialties of Malvasia and it is grown on about 2,200 hectares throughout that country.  It is mostly found in the Douro, where it is thought to have originated, and the Dão in the northern part of the country, but it is really grown throughout Portugal, as evidenced by its appearance on Madeira and the Azores islands.

Those familiar with the wines of Madeira may be starting to wonder about something right about now.  The four styles of quality Madeira are Sercial, Verdelho, Bual and Malmsey, and Malmsey is supposed to be made from Malvasia grapes.  Is the Malvasia used for Malmsey the same or different from the Malvasia Fina used for Bual?  This question was much more difficult to answer than I had thought as nearly all sources that I consulted simply say that Malmsey is made from Malvasia grapes with no further elaboration.  I actually put off even writing this post until my copy of Wine Grapes arrived, as I was hopeful that they could shed some light on it.  According to them, the grape used for Malmsey production on Madeira is a variety known as Malvasia Branca de São Jorge, which doesn't appear to be grown anywhere else or used for any other wines.  We'll get into more detail about it when I take a look at a Malmsey Madeira, but for now, suffice it to say that it is a distinct variety of Malvasia from Malvasia Fina, and wines labeled Bual and Malmsey are made from different grape varieties.

Having sorted all of that out, I still wasn't quite out of the woods.  I also had picked up a wine from the Canary Islands of Spain which was labeled as Gual and which I was told (and had no reason to disbelieve)  was made from the Bual grape of Madeira.  When I tried to search for Gual in the VIVC database, though, the only result that came back showed that Gual was a synonym of Albillo Mayor, the recently proven parent of Tempranillo that I'm not sure whether I tried or not.  After a bit of digging, I found this paper (in Spanish) which seems to confirm that the Gual of the Canary Islands is in fact the same as the Bual/Boal/Malvasia Fina of Madeira.

On the ascending sweetness scale for Madeira wines, Bual sits in third position, generally a little sweeter than Verdelho, but not as sweet as Malmsey.  I was able to try the NV Boston Bual from Vinhos Barbeito, which I picked up locally for around $40. In the glass the wine was a medium tawny brown with a kind of greenish-yellow tint at the rim.  The nose was intense with very nutty aromas of raisin and burnt sugar.  On the palate, the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity.  It was medium-sweet with flavors of burnt sugar, dark caramel, tart apple, crème brûlée, toasted nuts, maple syrup and raisins.  It was very well balanced wine, as many of these Historic Series Madeiras are, with a really lovely mix of acid and sugar that made it very easy to drink.  It was not as searingly acidic as the Sercial and was a bit richer than the Verdelho, and would be an easy slam dunk with nut or caramel based desserts.  I plan on serving the Malmsey from this same line with a pecan pie this coming Thanksgiving, and will report the results when I write about that grape and wine.

The second wine that I tried was the 2008 Vinatigo Gual from the Ycoden Daute Isadora region of Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands.  I picked this wine up from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet for around $32.  In the glass the wine was a medium lemon gold color.  The nose was fairly intense with aromas of apricot, cantaloupe, honey and red grapefruit.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of leesy dried apricot and cantaloupe fruit along with a bit of honeysuckle flower as well.  It was difficult to find a good temperature to drink this at, as it was a bit too alcoholic at room temperature, but was also too austere and bitter at fridge temp.  Cellar temperature or a little bit cooler seemed to really be the sweet spot for the wine.  It's a nice, interesting wine, but is difficult to justify at the price point.  I'd much rather pay the little bit extra for the Madeira and enjoy Bual in its traditional incarnation.  Those interested in finding out what the wine might taste like before it finishes its journey to becoming Madeira may be better served tracking down a Malvasia Fina from mainland Portugal if price is a concern, but those interested in an island wine showing a different side of the grape should definitely give this a shot.

Padeiro - Vinho Verde, Portugal

About a year ago, I was surprised to find a wine made from the Espadeiro grape in the Vinho Verde region of Portugal while I was visiting my in-laws for Thanksgiving in Pittsiburgh.  It was a spritzy little surprise that I thought really over-delivered for the meager price of $10.  A few months later, I started seeing wines in Boston-area shops made from a grape called Padeiro that were also from the Vinho Verde region of Portugal. Given how similar their names were, I figured there was probably some kind of link between them, but while there doesn't seem to be any evidence that these two grapes are related to one another, just what other grapes they may actually be related to is a complicated story indeed.

The confusion really started for me in Richard Mayson's The Wines and Vineyards of Portugal.  In that book, when you go to look up Padeiro in the index, it redirects you to the entry for the Tinto Cão grape, which is grown mostly in the Douro region of Portugal and is used in Port production.  Tinto Cão was pushed to the brink of extinction in the 1970's because while it is a very high quality vine, it is a very poor yielder and many growers pulled it up in favor of more productive vines.  Mayson notes at the end of his entry that "Tinto Cão is also known as Padeiro in the Basto sub-region of Vinho Verde and Tinta Mata."  None of which is particularly problematic, but when I looked up Padeiro on the Vinho Verde website, they do indicate that the grape is also known as Tinto Cão or Tinto Matias in some regions, but the following description also comes up: "Highly productive, it produces ruby to garnet-red colour wines with a distinctive aroma and taste, harmonious and flavourous (sic)."  Highly productive?  The singularly defining characteristic of the Tinto Cão vine seems to be its extraordinarily low productivity, so it seems pretty unlikely that we're talking about the same grape here.

I decided to take another look at the Espadeiro grape to see what Mayson had to say about it.  The index of Mayson's book directs you to two different entries when you try to look up Espadeiro.  The first is to the Sousão grape while the second is to a grape called Trincadeira Preta.  In the section on Sousão, Mayson mentions that this grape is also known as Vinhão in some parts of Portugal, but in the Basto region of Vinho Verde, it is known as Espadeiro de Basto.  Espadeiro Basto is, in fact, an accepted synonym for Vinhão/Sousão, but it isn't clear whether Mayson is saying that Espadeiro Basto is the same as Espadeiro.   This paper, which is in Portuguese, analyzed several different Portuguese grapes, including Vinhão, Sousão and Espadeiro, and they found that while Vinhão and Sousão were synonymous, Espadeiro was a separate cultivar. So, by extension, Espadeiro and Espadeiro Basto are two different grape varieties, though this isn't exactly clear in Mayson's book.  As for the Trincadeira Preta connection, this paper shows that a grape known as Trincadeira das Pratas, which is the same as Trincadeira Preta, is definitely different from Espadeiro as well (it also shows that neither grape is related to Vinhão/Sousão).

What does all that mean?  Essentially it means that Mayson's book is unreliable when it comes to grape synonymies, and thus we have ample reason to doubt his claim that Padeiro is the same grape as Tinto Cão. Reason to doubt is not the same as proof, though, so our next problem becomes trying to find information that will let us know definitively whether Padeiro is the same as Tinto Cão or any other grape for that matter.  The VIVC does have separate entries for both Padeiro and Tinto Cão, which is a good sign, but Tinto Cão is listed as an accepted synonym for Padeiro as well.  Further, there seems to be a lot of overlap in synonyms between Padeiro and Espadeiro, and at least one paper I read (citation 1 below) seemed to indicate that Padeiro was simply another name for Espadeiro in many places.

I searched for a really long time to try and find a DNA profile for Padeiro, and had virtually given up until I came across this paper, which was essentially announcing the creation of a database of microsatellite DNA for Portuguese grape varieties.  In that paper, the authors give the microsatellite profiles for hundreds of Portuguese grapes, including Padeiro, Tinto Cão and Espadeiro.  I took a look at the data, and sure enough, it was clear that all three grapes were different from one another.  That data was confirmed by another paper (citation 2 below) that gave the same results.

So what does all that mean?  It means that Padeiro is not the same grape as Tinto Cão or Espadeiro.  Further, Espadeiro is not the same grape as Sousão/Vinhão or Trincadeira Preta (aka Tinta Amarela).  Once again, one must be very careful when consulting reference works that do not cite any recent DNA studies, as there has been an avalanche of research just over the past decade or so that has revolutionized the way that we are able to think about and categorize different grape varieties.  Mayson's book is very informative and gives a masterful overview of the history of wine in Portugal and the characteristics of the different wine producing regions, but the section on the grapes is definitely out of date.  The book is out of print and outrageously expensive second hand, so be forewarned if you're looking for definitive information on Portuguese grapes, look elsewhere, but if you're looking for information on Portuguese wine in general, it is an unparalleled English-language resource.

I was able to pick up a bottle of the 2011 Quinta da Raza "Dom Diogo" Padeiro from my friends at the Wine Bottega for around $13.  In the glass this wine was a vibrant pink color with light fizz. The nose was nicely aromatic with cut watermelon, fresh strawberry and rainier cherry fruit.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high acidity and just a light prickle of CO2.  There were flavors of fresh red cherries, strawberries and raspberries backed with just a bit of bitterness from the CO2.  Overall the wine was bright, fresh and very refreshing.  The fruits were lively and prominent, but the zippy acid and the bitter twist at the end gave it nice balance and kept it from being just a liquid fruit cocktail.  I enjoyed this wine with tacos, which is a difficult food to match wine with in my experience, and it performed admirably.  The day I opened it it also happened to be nearly 100 degrees outside and this wine was just perfect in those conditions.  It's a little pricier than some other Vinho Verde wines that I've had, but I still believe that it's a great value at only $13.

CITATIONS

1)  Martin, JP, Arranz, C, Castro, ID, Yuste, J, Rubio, JA, Pinto-Carnide, O, & Ortiz, JM.  2011.  Synonymy in grape (Vitis vinifera L.) cultivars of northern Portugal and northwestern Spain.  Acta Horticulturae, 918, pp. 791-798.

2)  Castro, I, Martin, JP, Ortiz, JM, & Pinto-Carnide, O.  2011.  Varietal discrimination and genetic relationships of Vitis vinifera L. cultivars from two major Controlled Appellation (DOC) regions in Portugal.  Scienta Horticulturae, 127(4), pp 507-514.

Verdelho - Madeira, Portugal; Canary Islands, Spain & California, USA

Several months ago, I wrote a post about the Sercial grape, in which I indicated that  I was planning a series of posts that would deal with the major grapes used in the production of Madeira.  That project is taking longer than I would have liked, but today I'd like to continue it with a look at another of the "classic" Madeira grapes, Verdelho.  In my Sercial post, I briefly outlined the history of Madeira wine, and readers interested in that topic are advised to read through that post, as today I'm more interested in taking a look at what makes Madeira different from other wines, and to do that we need to take a closer look at how it is made.

Before it was the name of a wine, Madeira was the name of a place, namely an island group about 600 miles west of Portugal.  It was one of the last stops for European ships on their way to the Americas, and many of them stocked up on the wines of the islands before setting off on their journeys.  In the early days, the wines made on the Madeira Islands were ordinary table wines, but it was found that they spoiled very quickly on board the ships, as they were stored in large barrels and exposed to the elements, particularly the sun, which deteriorated them rapidly.  Eventually it was found that adding brandy to the wines helped them last longer while on board traveling ships, but even these fortified wines eventually cooked in the merciless sun in the middle of the ocean.  While the resulting product was very different from everyday wine, it was found that it picked up some new and interesting flavors not found in any other wines, and many people began to develop a taste for it.  In particular, the US Colonies were very fond of these wines from Madeira and became a large export market for them.

Up until the early 20th Century, some Madeira houses still put barrels of wine on ships in order to properly age them, but virtually no one does that anymore.  Today, there are basically two different methods used to properly age Madeira: estafugem and canteiro.  Estafugem is the quick and dirty method where the wine is placed in large stainless steel vats that are heated either via a hot water jacket on the outside of the tank or by immersing a heating coil in the wine itself.  The vats are sealed, but not filled to capacity and are usually agitated in some way to aid oxidation as well.  The heat is applied for about three months before being bottled.  This method is fast and cheap and is used for the production of low-quality Madeiras, as the secondary flavor characteristics prized by Madeira enthusiasts are at best only hinted at using this method.

The canteiro method is the one preferred for the production of higher quality Madeiras, especially for vintage or varietal Madeiras.  Here, the wines are placed in wooden casks that can vary from 300 to 2500 litres, and the casks are placed in a warm place.  Many lodges place them in lofts or in areas as high as possible (since heat rises, after all), though others just place them outside in the sun.  The casks are typically left alone for at least two years, and the wines made in the canteiro style cannot be sold until at least three years from the January 1st following the harvest.  The casks are not topped up, and most barrels lose about 5% of their liquid each year due to evaporation.  Basic Madeiras sold with the name of one of the four "noble" Madeira grapes, Sercial, Bual, Verdelho or Malmsey, usually go through this process, while vintage Madeiras are typically aged for much, much longer.

As mentioned above, Verdelho is one of the four noble Madeira grapes.  Each of the four noble grapes maps roughly on to a particular style of Madeira with Sercial being the driest, Verdelho the next driest, Bual a little sweeter and Malmsey the sweetest.  The Verdelho of Madeira is not the same as the Verdelho of mainland Portugal, which is now known as Gouveio (or Godello, in Spain).  The Madeira Verdelho is also widely grown in the Azores, and it is thought that vines from the Azores were brought to Australia in the 19th Century.  Verdelho is still relatively widely planted throughout Australia, to the extent that the Australian Alternative Varieties Wine Show does not consider Verdelho to be an alternative variety and will not consider entries made from it.  I must admit that I came across more examples of wine made from the Verdelho grape than I had anticipated, but in the end decided it was still unusual enough to merit inclusion here.

The first wine that I tried was the 2005 Twisted Oak Verdelho made from grapes grown in the Silvaspoons Vineyard in Lodi, California, which I picked up from my friends over at the Gypsy Kitchen for about $16.  As mentioned in my recent post on Torrontés, the Silvaspoons Vineyard is owned and maintained by Ron Silva, who primarily grows Portuguese grape varieties there.  In the glass, this wine was a light silvery lemon color with greenish tints. The nose was fairly reserved with some green apple and lemon-lime citrus fruits along with some slighly oaky and buttery aromas as well.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with fairly low acidity.  There were flavors of vanilla, ripe pear, buttery pie dough, ripe apple, coconut and pineapple candy.  I had half expected that the wine would be shot as it was 7 years old when I tried it, but it was drinking very well.  It's not really my style of wine, though, as the low acid and prominent oak are a deadly combination for my taste buds.  Fans of moderately oaked California Chardonnay will find a lot to like here, though, especially for the money.

The next wine that I tried was the 2007 Bodegas Viñátigo Verdello from the Ycoden Daute Isadora region on the western tip of the Tenerife island in the Canary Island chain.  I picked this wine up for around $32 from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep bronze-gold color.  The nose was fairly intense with leesy aromas of red apple, pear and honey with a little nuttiness and a little cheesy funk as well.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of toasted almonds and sawdust along with some honey, red apple, dried apple, dried apricot and baking spice.  This is a wine that really needs to be served as close to room temperature as you can manage, as it is harsh and spare when chilled too much.  As it warms up, though, the spice and dried fruits really become more apparent and the wine becomes much more generous and appealing.  It's not a cheap wine, but it is both good and interesting, which are the two major requirements I have for wines in this price range.

The final wine that I tried was the NV Vinhos Barbeito "Savannah Verdelho" from their Historic Series, which set me back about $40.  As a proud Georgia native, I was gratified to learn about the strong history of Madeira in the city of Savannah.  In addition to being a major port city for the import of Madeira wine in the early days of America, the city was (and I believe still is) the home to the Madeira Club of Savannah, a group of Madeira enthusiasts who gather monthly to drink fine old Madeiras, dine together and discuss issues of the day.  While this wine probably wouldn't be served at one of their functions, I found it plenty enjoyable.  In the glass the wine was a dark, deep tawny-brown color.  The nose was very intense with powerful roasted nut and burnt sugar aromas.  On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with high acid and medium sweetness.  There were zippy flavors of green apple, tasted walnuts and pecans, burnt sugar and smoke along with a slight salinity as well.  This wine was exceptionally balanced with an electric vein of acidity that really supported the sugar and nutty fruits.  This would be amazing with nutty desserts like pecan pie or baklava, but would also be nice with salty, funky cheeses as well.

Much of the discussion about the methods of producing Madeira wine is adapted from Trevor Elliott's The Wines of Madeira, which interested readers can order here.

Viosinho - Douro, Portugal

I've lamented the lack of sources for Portuguese wine grapes in the past, and unfortunately, the situation hasn't changed very much in the past few months.  For all of the interesting grapes that Portugal has, there are very few resources available that discuss them.  What literature there is on a lot of the grapes is sparse at best, and non-existent at worst.  Today's grape, Viosinho, falls into the sparse category, and as a result, today's post is going to be pretty brief.

Viosinho is a white grape grown predominately in the very famous Douro region of Portugal.  The Douro is where nearly all of the Port produced in Portugal comes from, and though Viosinho is not one of the grapes used for the production of vintage Ports, it is sometimes used in the production of white port (along with Malvasia Fina and Gouveio/Godello), which is just like Ruby port except that it is made using white grapes rather than red.  Traditionally, the white grapes were crushed and left on their skins for some time (as in "orange wine" production), but today, many producers are drastically shortening the skin contact or eliminating it altogether in an effort to make lighter, more refreshing white Ports that are a little lower in alcohol as well.

The market for fortified wines has fallen dramatically over the last century or so, and Portuguese wine makers have taken note of this trend.  More and more table wines are being made in Portugal in general and the Douro in particular as winemakers are finding that table wines sell much more briskly and reliably than fortified wines.  Viosinho was often prized in Port production for its ability to retain its acidity in the hot, fast growing season in many parts of the Douro, but not many table wine producers were utilizing the grape in their efforts because it produces only a few bunches of very small grapes, which equates to low yields and thus fewer bottles produced.  The vine is also particularly susceptible to a handful of fungal diseases which isn't a problem in many of the hot, dry areas of the Douro, but it does limit the number of sites where it can be grown successfully.  Despite these drawbacks a few producers have decided to give it a shot, and the early results seem to be quite promising.

Much of the wine produced in Portugal is blended, and today's wine is no exception.  The 2008 Quinta de la Rosa is listed as being 60% Viosinha and 40% "other Douro varieties."  I picked it up from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $20.  In the glass the wine was a medium silvery lemon color.  The nose was moderately intense with poached pear, pastry dough and lemon peel aromas with just something slightly buttery and oaky as well. On the palate the wine was on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity.  There were fresh, lemony citrus flavors with some  broader cooked pear and red apple fruits as well.  The hint of oak persisted on to the palate as well, but it was very well integrated.  The wine was surprisingly fresh given its age and probably could survive another few years in the bottle.  This isn't exactly my favorite style of wine, but it was well done and represents a good value for those who are looking for an alternative to big, oaky Chardonnays.

Sercial - Madeira, Portugal

I had initially planned to write about all of the great (and not so great) grapes of Madeira in a series of posts that would all be published in a week or two.  My drinking schedule hasn't allowed for that to happen, though, so rather than sit on some of these notes for an excessive amount of time, I've decided to go ahead and jump right into this new Madeira project by taking a look at the Sercial grape.

Before we get to the grape itself, let's take a moment to talk about what Madeira is.  Madeira is the name of the largest island in a series of islands ("The Madeira Islands," which are an archipelago, technically) about 600 miles off the western coast of Portugal and about 500 miles north of Africa.  This location made Madeira a prime stop on many shipping routes starting around the 16th Century, which meant that the merchants on the islands had access to any of the areas that these merchant ships were sailing to.  Additionally, when ships stop, they generally have to load up on provisions for their crew and one of the most important provisions for long sea voyages was wine.

The major problem with transporting wine from the island was that there was no refrigeration for cargo way back then so barrels of wine could end up sitting in a cargo hold for several months.  There is no shade on the open ocean so the sun would beat down on the decks and heat the holds below which often spoiled the wine.  The earliest wines made on the island of Madeira were regular table wines which were unable to survive this kind of treatment.  In an effort to preserve the wines during shipment, many merchants began to fortify the wines with brandy as higher alcohol levels allowed the wines to withstand these extreme conditions.  The wines still cooked, though, but many were starting to realize that these cooked wines were actually pretty tasty in and of themselves, and there began to be a premium on wines that had stayed on ships for longer periods of time and aged rather than for wines that were aged at the estates.  Into the early 20th Century, casks of Madeira wine were still sent on long sea voyages in order to age them properly.

The island of Madeira was pretty much the last stop for ships sailing from Europe to the colonies in the new world that would eventually become the United States.  Not only that, but the long sea voyage across the Atlantic was actually beneficial rather than detrimental to these wines, and the colonies began to develop a particular taste for the wines of Madeira.  Despite the best efforts of many farmers (including Thomas Jefferson), European grapes continued to die within a very short of being planted in the US and importing wines from Europe was the only option for those who couldn't stomach the taste of the wines made from native America grapes.  The confluence of these factors contributed to Madeira's popularity in the colonial states which continued into the early days of the United States's establishment as a nation.  Upon ratifying the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the authors and signatories toasted the document with Madeira in celebration.

Madeira's popularity held strongly until 1851, when the first of several waves of catastrophes struck the island's wine industry.  In 1851, Powdery Mildew struck the island and nearly eradicated the entire island's vines in less than three years.  Powdery Mildew spreads fastest in densely planted vineyards in hot, humid conditions, which pretty much described Madeira's vineyard layout and climactic conditions to a T.  A French scientist discovered that the application of sulfur to vines was effective in preventing Powdery Mildew, but by that time a good deal of the vineyards of Madeira had succumbed.  Much of the land was replanted, but in the 1870's, phylloxera arrived and decimated the vineyards yet again.  The solution of grafting onto native American rootstocks wasn't discovered for another ten years, and in the interim many growers simply gave up and planted their land over to sugarcane.  Others elected to simply plant hybrid vines or native American vines and abandon the traditional grapes altogether.

As soon as the island's wine industry began to recover from this blow, two more calamities struck.  These calamities didn't affect the vines or the wines on the island itself, but rather wiped out two of Madeira's major export markets.  The first was the Russian revolution of 1917 which removed the Russian Tsar and put that country on the road to communism, a political-economic system where luxury goods like expensive Madeira are frowned upon, to put it mildly.  The second event was the enactment of Prohibition in the United States, which completely shut down the US as an export market virtually overnight.  It is difficult to say whether the Madeira market could have recovered from any one of these hits, but to have all four of them happen within a 70 year span proved to be too much.  Many of the bottlers and shippers closed but many others consolidated into larger firms.  There were more than 30 firms who shipped Madeira in the late 17th Century and that number has dwindled to six today.

The wine I'd like to take a look at today is from a grape called Sercial, and for many years, the word Sercial referred more generally to a style of Madeira rather than the grape it was made from.  Madeira has historically been made from four different grapes: Sercial, Bual, Verdelho and Malmsey, all of which we'll eventually get to in future posts.  Wines made from Sercial tended to be the driest while those made from Bual were a little sweeter and those made from Verdelho were a little sweeter still until you got to Malmsey based Madeiras which were the sweetest of all.  What eventually happened was that the grape names came to represent the style of the finished wine and stopped being a reliable indicator of which grape was used.  Sercial became a generic term for a fairly dry Madeira regardless of whether the wine contained any Sercial grapes or not.  The EU has changed all of this with a recent mandate that requires that any bottle of Madeira that mentions a grape variety must be comprised of at least 85% of the stated variety.

The Sercial grape is grown mostly on the southern end of the island of Madeira, though it is also cultivated to some extent on the Portuguese mainland as well.  It is known as Esgana or Esgana Cão in the Vinho Verde region, where it is not particularly prized.  The Vinho Verde website proclaims that the grape is "productive, [and] produces wines with oxidation tendency, bitter and without quality."  Despite this proclamation, the grape is prized by Madeira growers because it ripens much later than the other Madeira grapes and keeps its acidity throughout the ripening process, which is a huge advantage in a climate as warm as that of Madeira.

Most of the Madeiras that I was able to try were in the Rare Wine Co's Historic Series.  These are non-vintage wines that are named for early American port cities on the east coast.  The Rare Wine Co. was attempting to create "affordable Madeiras that reflect the style and complexity of the great vintage wines...that would express true varietal character and display the traits of vintage Madeira."  The first wine in this series that I tried was the Charleston Sercial, which I picked up from Gordon's Fine Wine and Liquors for about $40 (Curtis Liquors also has some of this in stock as well).  In the glass this wine was a medium tawny brown color.  The nose was moderately intense and very nutty, like freshly roasted walnuts or pecans.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with very high acidity.  There were flavors of tangy green apples, roasted walnuts, caramel and burnt sugar. It was definitely a little sweet, but really tasted more off-dry as a result of the extraordinary acidity.  This wine was much lighter and more graceful than I was expecting and was really a lot of fun to drink.  The acidity is really bright and electrifying and carries the entire weight of the wine effortlessly.  Maybe when I get my next raise I'll go searching for a vintage Sercial but in the meantime, this is a nice, affordable alternative that is very delicious.

Antão Vaz - Alentejano, Portugal

I love Portuguese wines, but I hate trying to research them.  There are unique grape varieties throughout Portugal that I'm always excited to find in my local shop and am usually excited to drink as well, but when I sit down and try to write about them, it's very tough going.  There really aren't any books on Portuguese wine in general (the best of them has been out of print for a few years and is currently going for at least $150 second hand) and my online sources rarely have more than a sentence or two about any individual grape.  Today's grape, Antão Vaz, doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry and its Oxford Companion to Wine entry reads in full: "white grape increasingly favoured by winemakers in the Alentejo, southern Portugal, where it is now producing sound varietal wines."  There's not much there to try to stretch into a full blog post.

I found myself wondering why this might be the case.  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I actually knew very little about Portugal's history as a nation, and it turns out that this history is pretty important in understanding the current state of the Portuguese wine industry.  As mentioned in a few of my posts on the Georgian wine industry and the Romanian wine industry, the political climate within a given country can have at least as much of an impact on the wine industry as the natural climate can, and is often much more important.  Given Portugal's historical standing as one of the great European powers in the world and their current standing as one of the great developed nations of western Europe, it's easy to forget that there was a period of time in between where things didn't look quite so good.

In the 15th and 16th Centuries, Portugal was one of the great nations of the world.  Many of history's great explorers, like Vasco da Gama, were Portuguese and Portugal used its navy to become an active colonial power, claiming territories in places as geographically disparate as Brazil and Taiwan.  Their empire faltered and fell apart, as all of the great colonial empires did, throughout the next few centuries.  The modern history of Portugal can perhaps be said to have started in 1908 with the assassination of King Dom Carlos I and his heir apparent.  Manuel II was pronounced King, but his reign was shortlived.  The military overthrew the monarchy for good on October 5, 1910, and the Portuguese First Republic was founded.  This republican government was able to stay in power until 1926 when the military stepped in and overthrew it, establishing the Ditadura Nacional, or National Dictatorship.  This was followed in 1933 by the Estada Novo, or Second Republic, which was implemented by António Salazar who remained in power until 1968.

Salazar reorganized both the government and the economy based on the theory of corporatism (which you'll just have to read about here, if you're interested, as I'm not sure I can accurately summarize it).  The wine industry was part of this reorganization as well and many co-operatives were set up for the production of wine.  The State had a large degree of control over the industry, which is almost always a recipe for disaster for the production of quality wines as the State's interests are almost always profit-oriented rather than quality-oriented.  The overall quality of Portuguese wines began to fall and that fact coupled with the fact that many countries weren't comfortable dealing with authoritarian regimes led to the isolation of Portugal politically and culturally from the rest of Europe and also served to isolate the Portuguese wine industry as well.

The Portuguese government was once again overthrown by its military in 1974 during the Carnation Revolution.  This revolution started the process of independence for Portugal's overseas colonies and paved the way for a democratic government to come into power.  The new Portuguese constitution was ratified in 1976 and Portugal joined the EU in 1986.  Portugal has made tremendous strides in a very short period of time in a multitude of different economic theaters, but the resurrection of their wine industry in a mere 40 years has been truly remarkable.  Their wines have dramatically increased in quality and are distributed in greater and greater numbers to the US and to other countries throughout the world.

One of the consequences of the state-run wine industry was that there wasn't much research conducted on the history of Portugal's wealth of native grapes.  When wine is treated solely as a commercial product, the details of the grapes themselves are of little consequence and there's virtually no reason to devote any time or resources to tracking or tracing their particular histories or characteristics.  There has been a bit of renewed inquiry lately, but most of the studies that I've found have been focused on testing large collections of genetic material to eliminate synonymies across different regions, which are interesting to some extent but ultimately don't really offer any information about the grapes that don't have any alter egos in other areas.  The other issue is that, historically, Portugal has mostly produced fortified and sweet wines for export and their turn to making dry table wines is a very recent phenomenon.  There may be a lack of historical information about many of these grapes simply because they are only recently being used in dry table wines meant for export.

All of which is to say that there's very little information available about the Antão Vaz grape.  It is one of the better regarded native Portuguese vines, but is grown almost exclusively in the Vidigueira region of Alentejano, which is located about halfway in between the Atlantic Ocean and the Spanish border in the southern half of Portugal.  The grapes are large with thick skins and their clusters are somewhat loosely packed, all of which are helpful in combating fungal infections of the vine.  It is somewhat similar to Chardonnay in that it makes crisp, lively wines with nice acidity if picked early but can also make bigger more alcoholic wines that are suitable for barrel aging if left on the vine a bit longer.  It is somewhat frequently made into a varietal wine, though it is also occasionally blended with other local grapes like Arinto.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2005 Dolium Escolha Antão Vaz from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $20.  In the glass this wine was a fairly deep gold color.  The nose was intense with baked apple and pear fruits along with a cheesy, leesy kind of aroma.  There were also aromas of butter and something biscuitty or pastry-like that hinted at the wine's exposure to some oak.  On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of toasted almonds, baked pears and pie dough.  This wine was definitely past its peak, but it was still hanging in there.  It developed nicely as it approached room temperature and was much more pleasant to drink warm than with a chill.  Some ripe red apple notes began to appear, though the wine was still very nutty.  I'm not generally a fan of oaked white wines but the oak (French oak, according to the label) was pretty well integrated here, though whether that's a function of its age or of a deft winemaker's touch is unclear from this vantage point.  Fans of delicately oaked Chardonnays will likely find a lot to like in this wine, even at seven years old.  I'd like to get my hands on a younger version and if I'm able to find one, I'll certainly pick it up and provide an update here.

Weird Blend Wednesday - Vital, Fernão Pires & Arinto - Lisboa, Portugal

Weird Blend Wednesday has been on an extended hiatus since February, but today I'm dusting the old feature off and bringing it back!  Today I'd like to take a look at a wine from that most blendiferous of countries, Portugal.  Those of you who are familiar with how I like to set up my posts may notice that the picture on the left isn't a picture of a grape.  The reason for that is that I was unable to find a picture of a Vital grape and none of the images I found when searching for "weird blend" made any sense so I opted to go with a weird blender instead.  It turns out that most blenders just look like blenders and it took quite a bit of searching to find that Mickey Mouse inspired one, so please enjoy both it and the feature that no one has been clamoring for, Weird Blend Wednesday!

Today's weird blend is made from two grapes we've already taken a look at and one grape that's new to us.  We took a look at Fernão Pires, aka Maria Gomes, back in March and readers interested in more about that grape should check out this post.  A few days earlier, we took a look at the Arinto de Bucelas grape and spent quite a bit of time sussing out just what Arinto is.  Interested readers can read all about that grape and the Bucelas region where it is cultivated in this post.

Which brings us to the third grape, our new friend Vital.  It's no accident that I wasn't able to find any pictures of Vital since it has the unfortunate double-whammy of not only not being a featured grape anywhere and thus not demanding a lot of attention, but it also has a name that is a common English word which makes Google  searches very frustrating and borderline useless.  Nearly every result that did pop up from various combinations of "Vital," "grape," "Portugal," and "wine" was little more than a passing reference within a longer article about a particular region in Portugal (saying things like "Vital is grown in Estremadura," for example).  Wikipedia has no entry for the grape and the Oxford Companion to Wine's entry reads in full: "white grape grown in Estremadura in western Portugal which is known as Malvasia Corada in the Douro."

I did find this page, but as you can see, it's in Portuguese which is not a language that I'm fluent in (for those of you keeping track, English is the only language I am fluent in and I'm properly ashamed of that fact).  Running that page through Google Translate gives little bits of information about Vital's behavior in the vineyard, but little else.  It turns out that Vital is a vigorous vine that is prone to rot and which is capable of reaching high sugar levels in the vineyard (and thus high alcohol levels in the winery).  It is called Boal Bonifacio in some regions, though it is distinct from the Bual (or Boal) of Madeira.  It is also called Malvasia Corada in some places and Malvasia Fina or Malvasia Fina de Douro in others, and while it may be related to those grapes (distantly, if at all), it is definitely a distinct variety.  One research group (citation below) has shown that there is a bit of genetic overlap between Vital, Malvasia Fina and Bual, but not enough to establish any kind of a direct familial relation.  Another group has shown that Vital and Fernão Pires share some genetic similarities, but again, not enough to establish a specific relationship.

And that's pretty much all there is about Vital.  The region that this wine is from is called Lisboa, which used to be known as Estremadura (the change happened in 2009 because of a fear of confusion with the Spanish region called Extremadura).  It's on the western coast of Portugal and encompasses the large peninsula where the capital city of Lisbon sits and the area between the Atlantic ocean on the west and the Tagus River on the east (it's the upper area in black on this map).  Lisboa is a Vinho Regional which in the Portuguese classification system is similar to the Vin de Pays of France or the IGT of Italy.  There are nine smaller DOC regions within Lisboa, one of which is our old friend Bucelas.  The region is generally cooler and wetter than some of the other areas of Portugal due to its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean and the lack of any mountains or hills to block the cool sea breezes.  The temperatures do rise and the moisture drops as you move inland, but this is mostly white wine country.

The wine that I tried was the 2009 Quinta Cerejeiras which I picked up from my friends at Bin Ends for about $7.  In the glass this wine was a light silvery lemon color.  The nose was very aromatic and very citrusy with ripe pear, lemon peel and lemon juice.  On the palate it was on the fuller side of medium with fairly high acidity.  There were lemony citrus flavors with pineapple, ripe pear and green apple notes as well with just a hint of banana. The finish was mostly clean and minerally but there was a slightly bitter pithy note to it.  I was expecting something lightweight and crisp but this wine had a lot more body and weight than I would have guessed.  It was still bright and lively with very nice balance but it's not exactly the porch-sipper that I thought I was signing up for.  It is a very good value at only $7 a bottle and would be an excellent match for creamy chicken or pork or for richer fish dishes like salmon or tuna.

Citation:

Lopes, M.S., Sefc, K.M., Eiras Dias, E., Steinkellner, H., Laimer da Camara Machado, M., da Camara Machado, A. (1999) "The use of microsatellites for germplasm management in a Portuguese grapevine collection." Theoretical Applied Genetics, (99) 733-739

Fernão Pires (Maria Gomes) - Ribatejo, Portugal

Pop quiz time: what is the most widely planted white grape in Portugal?  If you're having trouble coming up with a Portuguese white grape at all, you probably have some pretty good company.  If you had asked me this same question when I started writing this blog, I would have guessed Alvarinho, but really only because that would have been the only grape that I knew.  I discovered that Fernão Pires was the most widely planted white grape in Portugal after I bought my first bottle, and I was definitely surprised.  I know that the Portuguese are crazy about blends and finding a varietal wine from Portugal is tough as it is, but finding a varietal Fernão Pires was pretty difficult for me and by the time I had tracked one down, I had actually seen a lot of varietal bottlings from a host of other grapes.  The important thing, though, is that I was able to find one (along with an interesting dessert wine as well), so without further ado, let's talk a little bit about Fernão Pires.

Fernão Pires is grown throughout Portugal though most of the plantings are concentrated in the central and southern regions.  The Ribatejo region, located just east of Lisbon in the center of the country, is where most of the plantings of Fernão Pires can be found (in fact, Fernão Pires makes up 40% of the total plantings of this region).  Ribatejo is a voluminous area in terms of total production, standing second only to the nieghboring Estramadura region, and it's because most of the vineyards are planted on very fertile alluvial soils in the river plains of the Tagus River (which is sometimes called the Tejo river, hence the Ribatejo name).  Fertile soils equal high yields which generally means low quality, and that equation holds true here as only about 5% of the production of the Ribatejo finds its way into DOC wines.  As in nearly all valleys, there are high quality sites away from the valley floors where better wines are made, but most of these sites are planted to the red varieties Castelão and Trincadeira, with only a few producers planting white grapes on these sites.

The grape is also grown in the Barraida region, which we are familiar with from our look at the Baga grape, though it is typically called Maria Gomes there.  In 1999 a team of scientists analyzed four different grapes, three of which were called Fernão Pires but which were grown in wildly different geographical regions of Portugal (Vinho Verde, Ribatejo and Oeste which is just West of Ribatejo on the Atlantic coast), and one called Maria Gomes and found that the four grapes were genetically identical, which means that Fernão Pires and Maria Gomes are synonyms for the same grape (Lopes, M.S., Sefc, K.M., Eiras Dias, E., Steinkellner, H., Laimer da Camara Machado, M., da Camara Machado, A. (1999) "The use of microsatellites for germplasm management in a Portuguese grapevine collection."  Theoretical Applied Genetics, (99) 733-739.).  This blog seems to think that the Fernão Pires name comes from a 16th Century Portuguese merchant, pharmacist and explorer named Fernão Pires de Andrade who was apparently instrumental in opening up trade channels with China, establishing a Portuguese embassy in Beijing, and then so insulting the Chinese that the two nations refused to do business with one another for about 40 years.  His Wikipedia biography doesn't mention grapes or wine at all, so I'm not sure if he's really the source of the name of the grape or not.

I'm also not sure about the source of the grape's other name, Maria Gomes.  There are two different women named Maria Gomes who have awesome life stories, but I'd be surprised if the grape was named for either of them.  The first is Maria Gomes Valentim who was the oldest verified living person in the world for about a month in May of 2011 until she passed away.  She was 114 years 347 days old at the time of her death, making her one of the 30 oldest people in history.  The other person was Maria Teresinha Gomes who pretended to be a general in the Portuguese army for over 20 years while she swindled her neighbors out of their savings in a series of investment scams.  Why is that a big deal?  She did it while posing as a man, even living with a woman at one point who was unaware of her gender until after it was revealed during her trial.  She was arrested and put in prison for three years. She died a free woman in 2007, though she was too poor to pay for her own funeral at the time.

It seems odd that the two most common synonyms for this grape are both names, one male and one female, but I can't see to find anything that would indicate that it's more than a coincidence.  It seems likely that Fernão Pires was named for Fernão Pires de Andrade, but the best evidence that I can find for it is that Fernão Pires de Andrade is the only other result you get from Google when looking for information about the Fernão Pires grape.  It's solid correlative evidence, but it's not enough for me to positively conclude that the grape is named for the man.  Maria Gomes is a much more common name and I can't find anything to link the grape to any individual with that particular name.  If anyone has any ideas, I'm open to hearing them.

I was able to find two different wines, one table wine and one fortified dessert wine, made from the Fernão Pires grape.  The table wine was the 2008 Quinta do Alqueve from Ribatejo which I picked up for about $8 from my friends at Curtis Liquors.  In the glass, the wine was a pale silvery lemon color.  The nose was reserved with some white pear, lemon rind and a touch of herbaceousness.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with medium acidity.  There were flavors of lemon citrus, white pear and fennel bulb with a slightly chalky, slightly stony kind of minerality on the finish.  This is probably the kind of wine that is best within a year or two of the vintage, even though Wikipedia informs us that it can be held for 2-3 years before drinking.  I didn't hate this wine, but it really didn't do much for me and I found little in it to distinguish it from pretty much any other white wine at this price point.  It wasn't bad, it just wasn't very interesting.  I'm actually sitting here having a really hard time even remembering this wine not because I shotgunned it straight out of the bottle but because it just didn't have a lot of character to it.  If you refuse to pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine, you'll probably find a lot to like here, but if price isn't really a concern for you, then I'd be hard pressed to find a reason to recommend this to you.

The second wine that I found was the NV Quinta da Alorna "Abafado" 5 Years bottling which I picked up from my friends at the Spirited Gourmet in Belmont for about $12. This wine is also from Ribatejo, but in 2009 the Ribatejo region became known simply as Tejo.  According to the winery's website, this wine is made from 100% Fernão Pires grapes.  The grape must is partially fermented and then spiked with brandy while there is still quite a bit of sugar left in order to arrest the fermentation (the final ABV for the wine is 17.5%).  The wine is then aged in old oak barrels for five years before being bottled.  In the glass, the wine is a pale tawny bronze color.  The nose is somewhat aromatic with dominant notes of raisins and brandy with a touch of something nutty.  On the palate the wine is on the fuller side of medium with medium acidity and medium sweetness.  There are flavors of raisins, burnt sugar, toasted nuts and something just a bit smoky.  It tastes a bit like someone took a box of Thompson Seedless raisins, soaked it in brandy overnight and then lit it on fire.  It's not as rich and complex as an aged Tawny Port or a good Madeira, but it is very good and is much better and more interesting than those things that are just labeled "Tawny Port" or "Madeira."  The $12 price tag is for a full-sized 750 mL bottle, so this does represent a good, interesting value for those who like these oxidative fortified dessert wines (and I definitely do).  I love drinking these kinds of wines with my homemade southern-style pecan pie, though anything with sugar and nuts is going to be slam dunk with this.

Arinto - Bucelas, Portugal

Sorting out the different grapes of Portugal is something of a nightmare.  To be as small as it is, Portugal probably causes me more headaches and more confusion than any other wine region.  For some reason, nearly every grape grown in Portugal has a ton of synonyms and the primary name for the grape changes from region to region within the country.  Further, as you might expect given their geographical proximity, there are a lot of grapes that are common to both Spain and Portugal, but pretty much none of them go by the same name in each country.  Some of them are pretty easy to spot and sort out (like Albariño and Alvarinho), but for others, there's no way you could guess that the grapes were identical.  Take the case of Tempranillo.  In Portugal, Tempranillo is typically called Aragonez or Tinta Roriz, while in Spain, it is mostly called Tempranillo but is also known variously as Cencibel, Tinta de Toro, and Tinto Fino.   All you can really do is try to memorize the synonyms yourself because, as you can see, there really isn't any kind of clue in the various names themselves that would let you know that you are dealing with a single grape.

That's a problem, but it's a problem that is much easier to sort out than the use of a single grape name as a synonym for a variety of different, unrelated grapes.  This is something like the Trebbiano problem in Italy where there are a handful of different grapes with the word Trebbiano in their name which, it turns out, aren't related to one another at all.  This is the kind of problem Arinto has in Portugal, and it caused me quite a bit of confusion before I was able to finally sort it all out.  When I bought the wine that I'll be writing about below, I looked it up in Wikipedia when I was in the store and read this sentence: "Arinto is a synonym of Malvasia Fina and Loureiro Blanco," which I interpreted to mean Arinto = Malvasia Fina = Loureiro Blanco.  Which, it turns out, isn't true at all.  What it means is that Malvasia Fina is known as Arinto in some places and Loureiro Blanco is known as Arinto in some places as well, but the names Malvasia Fina, Loureiro Blanco and Arinto refer to three distinct grape varieties which aren't related to one another (the Madeira grape Sercial is also sometimes called Arinto but isn't related to the other three grapes either).  Just to add a bit to the confusion, Tempranillo is also known in some parts of Portugal as Arinto Tinto, though, you guessed it, it isn't related to Arinto in any way.

Thinking I finally had it all straight, I went to the VIVC database today to see what information was in there about Arinto.  A search for "Arinto" brings up this page.  The "Prime Name" field is where you're supposed to look to find the grape you're looking for, as the "Cultivar name" field pulls up every occurrence of the search term as a synonym of other grapes.  As you can see from the list, there is no "Prime name" entry for Arinto though there are 29 entries in the "Cultivar name" column that have Arinto somewhere in them.  It turns out that Arinto is officially known as Arinto de Bucelas which, I'm guessing, is an effort to lessen confusion given the proliferation of the Arinto name and possibly to differentiate it from another grape called Arinto the Douro Valley which is now officially known as Arinto do Douro.  These two Arintos are not related but, and here's the really crazy thing, Arinto do Douro is an accepted synonym for Arinto de Bucelas.

Wasn't that fun?

Anyway, the grape we're here to talk about is Arinto de Bucelas which, as you might expect, is most commonly grown in the Bucelas region of Portugal.  Bucelas is located just north of the city of Lisbon which is within the Lisboa region (which was called Estremadura until 2009 when it was changed to avoid confusion with the Spanish region Extramadura) which is a thin strip of land on the western Coast of Portugal, almost right in the middle from north to south.  Grapes have likely been grown in this region since Roman times, though the style has changed throughout the years.  In the Elizabethan age, the wine was fortified and it is thought that a reference to a wine called Charneco in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 2 is a reference to Bucelas wine.  Thomas Jefferson was a fan of the lighter, unfortified wines from this region in the late 18th - early 19th centuries, as was Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, who made the wine fashionable in London where it was known as "Portuguese Hock" (Hock being an old British term for wines from Germany).  Because of this name it was suspected for many years that Arinto may be related to Riesling, but it turns out that it isn't.  In the studies that I've read, Arinto's closest relative is probably the Gouveio grape, which is called Godello in Spain (and is not to be confused with Verdelho, despite Wikipedia's efforts to lead you to believe otherwise).

Wines from Bucelas fell on hard times, though.  As the city of Lisbon and its surrounding areas grew, they overtook some of the vineyards from the region.  By the 1980's, Bucelas was a monopoly as all of the remaining vineyard land was owned by a single company who was making bad wine.  Things have changed for the better over the past decade or so as more quality-conscious producers have set about trying to revive the past glories of Bucelas wine.

I was able to find a bottle of the 2009 Quinta da Murta Bucelas for about $9.  Wines from Bucelas must contain a minimum of 75% Arinto, but this wine is 100% (you can read the technical specs here).  In the glass the wine was a pale silvery lemon color with a greenish tint.  The nose was moderately aromatic with ripe pears, green melon, lemon peel and something faintly tropical that I wasn't able to put my finger on (banana was as close as I got).  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with fairly high, zippy kind of acidity, a hallmark of the grape.  There were flavors of lemony citrus and green apple with pineapple, lemon peel and something slightly herbal.  The wine was quite tart and was just screaming for some kind of food.  This would be great with raw oysters, grilled scallops or even chicken served in a creamy lemon sauce.  It's not a profound wine, but given the under $10 price tag, it's a pretty good deal.  I have a hard time finding wines I like to drink for under $10, but this one was satisfying and tasty.  They apparently make about 80,000 bottles of this stuff so if you run across it, give it a shot.