Wines

We have already devoted some pages to this subject in the article Wine Industry (II-1545), to which we shall now add further essential information.

Many measures have been adopted and imposed by legislation to guarantee the genuineness of Madeira’s fortified wines. A detailed account of them is found in the esteemed work Navy and Overseas Archive (Arquivo da Marinha e Ultramar), of which a brief extract appears in the pamphlet Vinhos da Madeira by Nuno Simões, from which we transcribe the following illuminating passages:

“

On 23 December 1724 the merchants of Funchal addressed a petition bearing 38 signatures to the Senate (senado, the municipal council) concerning the wine trade and the prohibition on bringing in wines from the north of the island. The Senate established this prohibition by a municipal by-law (postura) of 9 January 1737. The merchant Francisco Teodoro submitted a petition on its disadvantages and advantages.

To prevent adulteration, the posts of juiz de fora (crown-appointed judge from outside the district) and President of the Residues were created in 1768. In that year Governor Sá Pereira issued by public proclamation (bando) an Order containing, in 13 articles, various measures to prevent the mixing of the wines of the South and the North, the latter being of inferior quality.

In a despatch of 30 August to Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, the same Governor expressly prohibited the blending of the two wines, as he had already ordered all the parishes and ports on 14 March.

None of these measures had their full effect, for on 16 August 1786 the Governor had to issue a new proclamation with severe penalties against offenders. The fraud was beginning to take new forms.

At the beginning of 1788, 19 Madeira wine merchants, most of them English, petitioned the Government against the fraud committed by some traders in the north of the island, who added the juice of black cherries to their wine to give it more colour and make it more like that of the south.

On 27 February of that year the Governor of the Island published a public notice (edital) ‘to eliminate the black cherry trees of this island, ordering that all those now existing be cut back to be grafted with red ones, and that all those which their owners will not uproot be pulled up by the roots’.

It also prohibited, ‘on pain of 6,000 réis (old Portuguese money of account; 1$000 = 1,000 réis, 1:000$000 = one conto = 1,000,000 réis) paid from gaol’, the replanting of black cherry trees, so as to prevent the adulteration ‘that the greed of some traffickers has attempted, to the grave discredit of the reputation of our wines and the ruin of their trade’. This Notice was not well received by those it threatened and affected. Petitions were submitted asking for its suspension. All were rejected, and one of their signatories, Canon Pedro Nicolau Acciaiuoli, was even arrested, an incident that Governor Dom Diogo Forjaz reported to the minister Martinho de Melo when informing him of the measures for the extermination of the black cherry trees.

Another form of fraud was denounced in 1791 in the petition of the English consul in Madeira to Luís Pinto de Sousa Coutinho, Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

Some merchants shipped Madeira wine to Tenerife and blended it there with very cheap local wine, in order to sell the whole as Madeira. The Archive holds the list of the ships that from 1784 to 1787 carried Madeira wines to Tenerife, where they were blended before being exported to Asia.

The decline in Madeira wine exports was attributed largely to these and other frauds, against which measures had to be taken in the early 19th century. There is no doubt that they contributed greatly to it.

Other and greater evils were, in the 19th century, to ruin Madeira’s principal product, which had been its greatest wealth ever since sugar, through competition from other countries, had lost first place in the Island’s economy.’

In 1914 the German chemists A. Kickton and R. Murdfield carried out an extensive and important analysis of Madeira fortified wines in the laboratories of the Hygiene Institute of the city of Hamburg. The Revista de Chimica Pura e Applicada published it in its issues of January to April 1916 under the title Preparation, Composition et Apréciation du vin de Madere et de ses substituts, a translation of the German original made by M. Eug. Ackermann. An offprint of it was issued as a pamphlet of 57 pages, which Dr Nuno Silvestre Teixeira rendered into our language in an excellent literal version and published in the Funchal Diário de Notícias (‘Daily News’) in November 1916. It is from the last of these articles that we take the following passages, because of their particular bearing on our subject.

“

I – Preparation

Madeira wine is a dessert wine of a particular character, prepared exclusively on the Portuguese island of Madeira by a method handed down from long ago.

Its special method of production consists in subjecting the must of fresh grapes (with whole bunches) to a very prolonged alcoholic fermentation. The base wines, once decanted or racked – generally well fermented, but sometimes also base wines still containing sugar – then have alcohol added (from wine or from sugar cane).

Sweetening is generally carried out by adding fortified must of fresh grapes (geropigas), and frequently also with cooked (caramelised) must, or else by using both these sweetening agents together, the second often serving chiefly for colouring.

In the products we examined, which may have been prepared before the Portuguese ban on sweetening of 1908 came into force, cane sugar was still very frequently used for sweetening. This sugar had been added partly as dry sugar and partly as syrup, and frequently also as a very dilute aqueous solution. Sweetening with cane sugar was generally accompanied by an addition of caramelised must. Only more rarely does sugar colouring appear to have been used for this purpose.

To hasten their maturing, and probably also to give them their special qualities, Madeira fortified wines are generally subjected to a heat treatment lasting months. This is almost always done in specially installed heated rooms (estufas (heated store for ageing Madeira wine)) brought to a temperature of roughly 50 °C; sometimes the wine, held in casks or glass bottles, is exposed to the rays of the sun. For the same purpose the wine is sometimes sent on a voyage to the tropics.

Madeira wine is often fortified again before export. The composition of Madeira wines is far from uniform across the various analytical results. This is due partly to the varying quantity of sugar in the different base wines, and above all to the differences in the sweetening agents used.

In general, the alcohol content of Madeira wines imported into Germany varies between 13.5 and 16 g per 100 cm³, corresponding roughly to 17 to 20% by volume. The proportion of extract (including sugar) varies between 5 and 8 g; that of acidity between 0.5 and 0.7 g; and that of sugar-free extract between 2 and 2.8 g per 100 cm³. For the last two components, the lower limit values have been set too low rather than too high, since samples that were entirely above any suspicion of blending by the addition of water show higher values, namely about 0.58 g for acidity and from 2.3 g upwards for sugar-free dry extract, per 100 cm³.

What is to some extent characteristic of Madeira wine is the ratio between the kinds of sugar, since the quantity of fructose is generally appreciably lower than that of glucose or, at most, equal to it; normally fructose makes up between 44 and 50% of the total sugar (as invert sugar). Exceptionally, Madeira wine also shows a predominance of fructose, but even then it is usually not very marked (up to about 52%).

As far as can be concluded from the analyses communicated to us, the content of Madeira wines is roughly 0.2 to 0.4 g of ash, 0.25 to 0,005 g of phosphoric acid, and 0.5 to 0.9 g of glycerine per 100 cm³.

III – Assessment

The provisions of the German wine law of 7 April 1909 have no objection to the method of preparing Madeira wine as practised in its country of origin, at least so long as cane sugar has not been used as a sweetening agent.

Under the German wine law, Madeira wines in which the presence of cane sugar can be shown may not be imported, nor may they circulate within the Empire, unless it is proved (as we explained above, such proof now seems very doubtful or difficult) that the products received their added sugar before the publication of the German wine law and before the Portuguese ban on sweetening of 1908 came into force. In any case, Madeira wines in which blending can be detected, as still very often happens, must be condemned.

Under the provisions of the commercial and maritime treaty between Germany and Portugal, and under the rules of the German wine law, the designations Madeira, Madeira Wine and similar word combinations are reserved, for circulation within the German Empire, to genuine fortified wines from the Funchal region that have not been blended with other wines.

Dessert wines from Madeira with an alcohol content below 17% by volume (or below roughly 13.5 g per 100 cm³) cannot be regarded as Madeira wines complying with Portuguese legal requirements and eligible for export to Germany, and consequently must not be admitted to domestic circulation under the designation ‘Madeira Wine’.

Imitations of Madeira wines

It is Spanish and often also Greek dessert wines that chiefly enter the trade as imitations of Madeira wines.

The Spanish and Greek imitations of Madeira wine often differ so greatly in composition from the chemical composition of genuine Madeira wines that chemical analysis can always detect the substitution of these products for the genuine wines.’

As is well known, the Junta Nacional do Vinho (National Wine Board) is an important national body whose purpose is to guide and protect viticulture and wine-making in the various regions of the country. The services it has already rendered, and will continue to render, to the cultivation of the vine and the trade in its rich products are very considerable. It was by the decree of 18 June 1940 that it extended its activity to the Madeiran archipelago, where its work has generally proved beneficial and produced appreciable results, despite the difficulties that always arise when a new means of protecting agriculture is introduced. The reports of the Junta Nacional do Vinho for the years 1940 and 1941 contain a great deal of data and information of particular interest to Madeira, but their considerable length does not allow us to reproduce them here.

Unfortunately, a complete monograph on the wines of Madeira has yet to be written, one that would trace their history, from the middle of the 15th century to the present day, in all the varied and interesting aspects it offers us.

This would require a broad descriptive work, carefully and thoroughly organised. Besides covering the various phases of the industry and the methods of wine-making, it should also provide reliable information on the proper choice of soil and the planting of vine cuttings, the effective treatment of the vines, the making and keeping of musts, the preparation of wines for shipment, their trade at home and abroad, the rigorous analysis of the so-called fortified wines and the careful preservation of the celebrated reputation they enjoy throughout the world. Each of these would be a subject of research and study in its own right, and for this it would be essential to make use of the valuable material scattered through various publications.

The article published in the newspaper Informação Vinícola of 20 September 1943, from the pen of the distinguished agricultural technician (regente agrícola) José da Cruz Tavares and entitled Folclore do Vinho e da Vinha na Ilha da Madeira, is not without originality and holds interest for the study of Madeiran ‘folklore’. We shall place it on record in these pages, and it will surely arouse the curiosity and interest of some readers of this work.

“

Madeira is a region rich in the folklore of the vine and of wine, richer perhaps than any other part of mainland Portugal.

“

The people sing of the grapes and the wine from the various varieties grown, but they single out those that give them the table wine they like best. They call this ‘dry wine’ because it undergoes no treatment, to distinguish it from ‘treated wine’ or ‘sweet wine’ – the fortified wine.

The Madeiran of the lower classes drinks it heartily, sometimes to excess, to the detriment of his own health and of the household budget. At the festivals and pilgrimages in which the region abounds, he goes along singing to the accompaniment of rajões, machetes and braguinhas. But for this he makes his worth felt in the following manner, especially when he has a good voice:

But little by little he grows more demanding:

And things warm up, with charambas and bailinhos, amid banter and meaningful glances at the girls. The glasses are drained one after another, until matters may reach the raging paroxysm of the man who sang:

In contrast to the barbarous materialism of this quatrain, admire the lyricism of this other one, in which the poet, lost in love, also gives his beloved the names of two commonly grown vines, among other pretty things he says to her:

In Madeira the wine of the direct producers Jacquez, Isabella or ‘American’, Herbemont and Cunningham is much appreciated. But the ‘American’ or ‘scented wine’ is always the favourite:

He even goes so far as to credit it with certain medicinal virtues:

This fine excuse and reason for drinking a little might well have been given to his sweetheart by the man who came to lament, or to mock, in this fashion:

Of course, the people neither can nor know how to pronounce the tongue-twisting names of the other direct-producer varieties, and so they rendered them as best they could for their songs:

It is clear enough what that glass of ‘jaqué’ was, with which the poet regaled himself, comparing it to the delights of a pinch of snuff. It will be harder, however, to make out what the treasure was made of that another balladeer sang of, forgoing the hundredfold reward God would send him:

For ‘armum’, or ‘armon’ and ‘armurio’ on Porto Santo (‘holy harbour’), is neither more nor less than the Herbemont.

Yet not everyone is content with badly made plonk of poor stock. There are still those who have good taste and can appreciate what will always be good in every age:

And the singer was right! For Verdelho yields one of the finest and most fragrant fortified wines, when it is well tended and mellowed by the years.

If many people like wine, others prefer the grapes, although not everyone is able to grasp at once the longing of this poetess:

This ‘caninha’, like its synonym ‘canim’, is the vernacular rendering of the Cunningham direct producer, even though nobody says so.

In Madeira it is very common to make piquette (água-pé, thin drink made from pomace and water) from the pomace, which people either drink or leave to turn into vinegar. For want of anything better, the ‘peasant’ (vilão), the countryman, makes do with it:

Makes do, so to speak... For there are crafty fellows who always have an easy resource and an expedient to hand, like the one who once came out with this:

Worse off are those who have nothing but were used to having something. See the grim simplicity with which they nurse their longing for the good plant that produces the precious liquid which makes folk merry and also gives rich shade in front of their doors:

It is done by men, women and children, by the household, neighbours, friends and guests, and while it lasts there is something of a festival, of merriment, with Cupid on the loose:

The grape harvests of Porto Santo seem also to hold a strong attraction for Madeirans, thanks to the splendid grapes grown there and the peaceful, healthy air one breathes:

Porto Santo has lively festivals and a celebrated white table wine made almost exclusively from Listrão, which delighted a certain singer fond of revels and pilgrimages:

Once picked, the grapes go in baskets to the wine presses, where the torment of the treading and the ‘second treading (repisa)’ awaits them. Treading is simply crushing by foot; but the second treading is an extremely violent operation to which the pomace is subjected after pressing, in order to extract a little more must from it when piquette is not to be made. While it lasts, the workers sing a song of its own, a traditional one, the ‘song of the second treading’, keeping time with the movement of jumping, feet together, with force and zest, on the spread-out pomace. It is a lengthy operation that must be done well if it is to be economical:

Nor do the popular quatrains dedicated in Madeira to the vine, the grape and wine end here’.