Magic of Madeira Weaves an Even Bigger Spell at the Island's Annual Wine Festival

There is an island far to the south west which has been supplying British tipplers with the good stuff for more centuries than most of the imported booze that we love. Shakespeare was waxing lyrical about the pleasures of the malmsey of Madeira and the delicious fortified wine was giving much pleasure long before that, given its early Greek origins.

Throughout those long years the British have enjoyed a direct relationship with the Portuguese island which was a regular stopping off point for British sailors, and there are old English families who still have a big influence in making and selling Madeira wine.

But things are changing on this most beautiful of all the Atlantic islands. Tourism is holding a great deal more sway than it did even a dozen years ago, partly thanks to the fact that the ever popular destination now has regular cheap flights from local UK airports. I flew down for a few days recently to attend the beginning of a new wine festival - and therein lies a story…

Because tourism is a double edged sword if ever there was one. It can have as many detrimental effects as benefits - but Madeira’s new wine festival reflects a positive side to the equation.

As everyone knows, traditional Madeira wine was - and is - fortified. The delicious and powerful stuff Shakespeare was drinking - and the Duke of Clarence was being drowned in - contains a strong rum-like spirit which effectively preserves the wine. Back in the days when fermented grape juice was a hit and miss affair created without the help of preservative agents such as sulphites, a long sea journey could spell the death of an ordinary wine - unless it was preserved with a whack of strong alcohol. 

It’s said the discovery of preserving wine happened by accident during long voyages to and from Portuguese colonies in the south of India. Whatever the story, English merchants working out of Madeira realised they’d found a way of creating a delicious and extremely stable product - and they stuck to their winning and profitable ways for centuries.

And so for 100s of years the farmers of this mountainous isle produced grape juice for the big Madeira houses, keeping back just a little for their own personal consumption. I’m told the homemade table wines of yore were unpalatable without a touch of citrus and cane sugar. 

But, in recent times of cheap air travel, the burgeoning number of visitors to the island began demanding ordinary non-fortified, but drinkable, table wines with their meals. No problem - good wines could be shipped from mainland Portugal - but some local grape growers began to see a window of opportunity. 

Barbusano vineyard

It is still the case that most grapes grown on the island are sold into the big fortified wine operations, but a new brand of wine-makers like - Antonio Oliveira with his Barbusano label - have begun making delicious and interesting reds, whites and roses for the past dozen years. Hence, the new annual wine festival… 

I’d never been to Madeira before and what I discovered was one of the most beautiful and friendliest tourists destinations I’ve called at in years. As these are the food and drink pages I won’t dwell upon the stunning scenery or the dizzying and incredible walks, but will concentrate on the Madeira wines and cuisine. 
It might seem odd, but the very first dish I was offered was a starter of limpets - a shellfish much scorned by us, but highly prized by the islanders. I could see why. They were a toothsome revelation. Fried in olive oil for just three or four minutes (with plenty of garlic) these little suckers were among the best shellfish I’ve tasted. I do wonder, though, if they might be a separate species from our own. Darker and flatter, they didn’t have the intense chewiness of our limpets.

But perhaps best meal I had was cooked by winemaker Antonio Oliveira. We’d taken a jeep tour with a company called True Spirit and this included a visit to his amazing winery on the wild, damp north side of the island. After walking around the steep terraces perched 400 or 500 feet above the beach we enjoyed a wine-tasting - then sat down to a lunch of skewered beef cooked over vine wood. The skewers were bay tree branches as fat as your thumb - giant bays being common in the cloud forests above the vineyards. The beef was proper grass-fed stuff brought across from the Azores where they specialise in producing top notch meat. 

Maybe it was the wine, or the excellent company - but that beef was the best carnivorous morsel I’ve eaten in a while.

The experience was only matched by lunch the following day when, after a morning walking along one of Madeira’s famous high altitude leats (called lavadas), we descended to one of the most dramatically located beaches I have ever set foot on. To reach it we took a thousand foot cable car down the side of an immense cliff to a kind of heavenly organic garden where we were met by the enigmatic owner who showed us around his magical demesne. 

Mário Fernandes climbed some boulders to point out a rather straggly looking vine which he discovered in 1975. He called the Madeira Wine Institute in for a look and they identified it as an original Malvazia Candida planting from the Greek Island of Crete. They cloned it and Mário started replanting this historical one-off in the 1980s. 

He now uses the grapes from these ancient vines to make the nearest thing to the original malmsey that you can taste. We were lucky enough to be taken into the dark depths of a big old wine cellar by the rocky shore were Mario matures his malmseys and other early forms of tipple in old wooden barrels. And there in the fragrant gloom we tasted the liquid ambrosia, with classical music booming among the barrels and beams and the salty scents and sounds of the sea coming through an unglazed window.

It was a magical experience. I could have stayed chatting with the charming Mario and his wife Isabel all day. Instead we eventually went to enjoy a first class lunch in his Restaurante Fajã dos Padres at the end of the beach under the 1000 foot sea cliffs, before ascending heavenwards in the scary cable car which climbs almost vertically into Madeira’s azure skies.

We’re made to feel guilty about flying through such skies nowadays, but if I was limiting my airliner journeys I’d try to make Madeira and its food and wine an exception to the rule.

Fine out more at www.madeirapromotionbeaureau.com