, A magnetic miasma, an elixir of youth

After drinking a very special bottle of Vintage Madeira, Andrew Jefford wonders if the style is an endangered vinous species.

There’ll be few future chances, I suspect, to taste wines four years older than I am, especially wines so tonic in their effects that they might be considered an elixir of youth. The prime candidate for elixir status is Vintage Madeira—as it was called back in 1952 and when this bottle was released in the mid-1970s in anticipation of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. (The official term for Vintage is now Frasqueira.) 

Drunk in spring 2023, this was mesmerizing wine, poured from a bottle that its generous owner had decapitated with red-hot iron tongs. Not for dramatic effect alone but because (like all Madeira) it had been aged upright and stoppered by a cork now likely to be friable, even crumbling. Perhaps, too, in tribute to Vulcan, the god of fire. We only feast on this wine because red-hot, molten rock plumed from the bottom of the Atlantic for more than 100 million years, eventually piercing the waves around 20 million years ago and creating the soaring basalt edifice we know as Madeira today.

It smelled, powerfully, of rue and lavender, of apples and raisins, of citrus peels. It was thick, sweet, and lavish—almost a Boal, we speculated. The acidity, of course, was architectural, as it always is in Madeira wine, structuring its sweetness, marshaling its allusions in the mouth. There was something smoky there, moving and churning inside the

This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine

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