Madeira's Best Vintages Were Made by Accident on Eighteenth-Century Ships

Madeira is a fortified wine from the Portuguese island of the same name in the North Atlantic. It is, by some margin, the most durable wine ever produced. A bottle from 1715 that has been kept reasonably will pour clearly today, retain its acidity, and taste — most tasters report — much like a 1970s vintage of the same kind. An opened bottle on the kitchen counter does not noticeably degrade for months. Both qualities arise from the same accident.

Madeira sits in the trade route between Lisbon and the West Indies, and from the seventeenth century onward Portuguese ships routinely picked up barrels of the local wine on outbound voyages and re-sold whatever they didn't unload on the return leg. Producers noticed that the unsold barrels — having spent three to six months sloshing in a hot ship's hold, crossing the equator twice — tasted significantly better than the same wine that had stayed on the island. The combination of heat (sometimes well over 40 °C) and gentle continuous oxidation produced a chemically distinctive end-product immune to further spoilage. By the early eighteenth century, voyage-aged Madeira was a premium product specifically requested by merchants.

Land production eventually had to replicate the conditions. The estufagem system used today involves storing wine in heated rooms or in stainless tanks held between roughly 45 °C and 50 °C for at least three months for the cheaper grades; the finer canteiro method involves casks aged for years in roof spaces that get unreasonably warm in summer.

Madeira shaped American history in odd corners. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson drank it routinely; the Declaration of Independence was reportedly toasted with it. The USS Constitution was christened with a bottle in 1797. A 1715 Terrantez bottle sold at auction in 2016 for $39,000.