Madeira wine

Madeira wine

 

Not very surprisingly, this Portuguese fortified wine originates on the Maderia islands, a small collection of islands southwest of Portugal in the Atlantic ocean. Madeira wines are produced in a variety of different fashions ranging from dry wines drunk on their own as an apéritif, a drink made to stimulate the appetite before a meal, or as a sweeter wine made to be drunk together with a dessert.

 

Cheaper versions of Madeira wine can also be mixed together with salt and pepper for flavoring in different dishes. A fortified wine is a wine where usually brandy has been added to the mixture before fermentation, this kills the yeast and leaves residual sugar behind, making fortified normally both sweeter and stronger than other wines.

 

Madeira is not only fortified, it also has a very special manufacturing process where the wine is sometimes heated up to temperatures as high as 60°C ( 140°F ) and deliberately exposing the wine to some levels of oxidation. This gives Madeira wines the ability to be quite long lived, even after being opened it can survive unharmed up to a year.

 

Madeira wine dates back as far to the Age of Exploration, or Age of Discovery, a period in time starting in the 15th century and ending some time during the 17th century during which Europeans started to intensively started to explore and map the world.

 

Reports have been found dating back to the 16th century saying that a well-established wine production exists on the islands to supply ships going to the New World and East Indies.

 

Madeira produced from Tinta Negra Mole are required by law to label each bottle with terms that indicate the sweetness of the wine, where seco ( dry ), meio seco ( medium dry ), meio doce (medium sweet) and doce (sweet).