Written by admin
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
When you are spending your holidays to Madeira, be sure to sample some of their legendary Madeira wine. This Portuguese alcoholic beverage, whose history can be traced towards the Age of Exploration when Madeira was a stopover for ships heading out to the East Indies or the New World, is created in a variety of styles. The varieties range from dry wines, which can be consumed as aperitifs, or sweet wines, which can be drunk at the end of a meal.
Making Madeira wine is special due to an aging process called estufagem (heat aging), which imitates the effects of grape juice being aged during a months-long sea voyage through tropical climates. Estufagem is typically done in three main ways: one is to bulk age the wine in concrete or iron pipes with heat coils or piping that allow hot water to heat up the container. Two, used and officially recognized by the Madeira Wine Institute, is to store the wine in wooden barrels where it would be steamed in a specially designed steam room The third method, for top-quality wines, is to place the wine in warm rooms and let the sun heat it naturally in which the process can last for 2 to 10 decades.
The resulting wine has a very robust taste that won’t fade for a very long time after the container has been opened. Depending on how long the wine’s fermentation was stopped by adding various grape spirits, Madeira can have several different tastes:
1. Sercial – nearly fermented with high acidity. It is very dry and contains little residual sugar, giving it an almond-like flavor.
2. Verdelho – fermentation is halted a little earlier than Sercial. The resulting wine is noted for its high acidity and has a smokey flavor.
3. Boal – fermentation is halted when its sugars reached between 2.5 to 3.5 Baume. It is characterized by raisin flavors.
4. Malmsey – fermentation is ceased when it sugars are between 3.5 to 6.5 Baume. It is has a pleasantly sweet coffee-caramel flavor.
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