Madeira 4

Wines made from at least 85% of the noble varieties of Sercial, Verdelho, Bual, and Malvasia are usually labelled based on the amount of time they were aged.

Reserve (five years) – This is the minimum amount of ageing a wine labelled with one of the noble varieties is permitted to have.

Special Reserve (10 years) – At this point, the wines are often aged naturally without any artificial heat source.

Extra Reserve (over 15 years) – This style is rare to produce, with many producers extending the ageing to 20 years for a vintage or producing a colheita. It is richer in style than a Special Reserve Madeira.

Colheita (or ‘Harvest’) – This style includes wines from a single vintage but aged for a shorter period than true Vintage Madeira. The wine can be labelled with a vintage date but includes the word Colheita on it. Colheita must be a minimum of five years of age before being bottled and may be bottled any time after that. Effectively, most wineries would drop the word Colheita once bottling a wine at over 19 years of age because it is entitled to be referred to as vintage once it is 20 years of age. At that point, the wine can command a higher price than if it were still to be bottled as Colheita. This differs to Colheita Port which is a minimum of seven years of age before bottling.

Vintage or Frasqueira – This style must be aged at least 19 years in cask and one year in bottle, therefore cannot be sold until it is at least 20 years of age. The word vintage does not appear on bottles of vintage Madeira because, in Portugal, the word “Vintage” is a trademark belonging to the Port traders.

A wine labelled as Finest has been aged for at least three years. This style is usually reserved for cooking. The terms pale, dark, full and rich can also be included to describe the wine’s colour.

Madeira produced from Negra Mole grapes used to be legally restricted to use generic terms on the label to indicate the level of sweetness as seco (dry), meio seco (medium dry), meio doce (medium sweet) and doce (sweet). However, in 2015 the Madeira Wine Institute announced that producers may officially recognise Tinta Negra on their front labels, and that all “expressions” must state their bottling date.

Rainwater

A style called “Rainwater” is one of the largest selling styles of Madeira in the United States. Ideas as to how this style was developed vary. The most common theory involves a shipment destined for the American colonies that was accidentally diluted by rainwater while it sat on the docks. Rather than dump the wine, the merchants tried to pass it off as a “new style” of Madeira and were surprised at its popularity among the Americans.