Last Updated on September 20, 2026

The taste of Madeira

Dancing in a lagare (trough) of grapes, arm in arm with new friends, a band playing in the vineyard, I felt as if I was in a dream. As we trod the grapes beneath our bare feet, the juices ran off into a large bucket, and soon the first glass of grape juice was passed around. Later, the rest of the juice was dispatched to the winery to continue its journey, ending up, in a few years, as a bottle of Madeira wine.

I visited Madeira to experience the food and wine of this beautiful volcanic island, but what I had not realised was quite how much I would learn.

I began my education at Blandy’s Wine Lodge in Funchal with a horizontal tasting of four wines. Not that I was lying down, mind you, more that the wines were all the same age (3, 5, or 10 years), across different styles. These styles are classified by their level of sweetness:  Sercial (dry), Verdelho (medium dry), Bual (medium rich), and Malmsey (rich/sweet). You could opt for a vertical tasting, which comprises four ages of the same style or grape.

Aficionados will enjoy the vintage tasting, where you can try premium wines, dated and aged in oak barrels for at least 20 years in the attic of the Lodge. Using this natural heat from the sun is called the canteiro method (canteiros are the wooden beams that support the attic). You can step back in time up to 100 years. The saying goes that men age like a good wine. As we were celebrating my husband’s birthday, I thought this would be a fabulous gift – to taste the Madeira wine of his birth year, and then take home a bottle of that vintage.

My next level of learning occurred in restaurants where sommeliers offered excellent Madeira wine pairings. This surprised and delighted me, as I had previously understood Madeira wine to be a dessert wine. Such was my ignorance.  Turns out that it pairs really well with fish, for example. In fact, Japan is one of the fastest-growing export markets for Madeira wine.

My late August visit to Madeira coincided with the annual Wine Festival in Funchal. Each evening, I had an opportunity to taste my way through the wide array of Madeira Wine houses (there are eight) and their products, chat to the producers and savour the diverse notes of this renowned fortified wine selection.

Finally, I was invited as a guest of Visit Madeira to the grape harvest festival at Blandy’s Quinta do Bispo in São Jorge, a vineyard where I learned a great deal about the history of Madeira Wine. When the island, now known as Madeira, was discovered in 1419, it was covered in very dense forest, hence its name – madeira means wood in Portuguese. After clearing some of the laurisilva forest – the fires burned for seven years – sugarcane was grown and thrived, thanks in part to the fertile volcanic soil that comprises this island.

After a century of what came to be known as the  ‘white gold’ rush, the sugarcane crop began to fail due to depletion of the soil from an intensively farmed monocrop. Added to this downturn was the increasing competition from the Caribbean sugarcane industry. Madeiran farmers turned to planting grapevines and making wine.

Since all ships sailing to the Americas stopped at Madeira, wine barrels were loaded onboard to be taken to their destinations. To prevent the wine from turning to vinegar during the voyage, it was fortified with extra alcohol, so that no bacteria could grow. The story goes that the barrels of fortified wine heated up in the hold of the ships, with the result that the wine tasted even better after its voyage. This was due to the increased oxidation that occurred due to the heat. From this point on, what is now known as Madeira wine was born and has been matured ever since in warm attics. Unlike Port, for example, which is matured underground.

The vineyards in Madeira are most often small – not much bigger than a tennis court – and are generally unmechanised. Most of the maintenance of the vines and harvesting is done by hand, relying on the community of neighbours, friends and family to help. Unlike the large vineyards you might see in other countries, on Madeira the grapes are grown using the latada system – wire trellises on which the grapes grow, forming a canopy. This not only increases airflow and reduces fungal growth, but it also enables the farmers to grow vegetables and other crops beneath the grapes.

While  Madeira wine has always been part of the Madeiran drinking culture, in the UK it was once thought of as an older person’s beverage. The old-fashioned phrase ‘have a Madeira, m’dear’ bears testament to its erstwhile history, with Madeira having accompanied the British to the colonies and gaining popularity back home too.

Nowadays, in addition to it making an appearance on wine pairing lists, mixologists are exploring its use in cocktails – I drank a wonderfully refreshing and light-tasting Madeira Tonic at the Blandy Quinta do Bispo, which I would happily make for friends. Even the bottles, which in Madeira are black and white, now sport jauntier labels for the export market. This is important to the well-being of the brand, as 75 – 80% of the 3 million bottles produced annually are exported.

Madeira wine is not without its challenges. Younger people are more inclined to seek low alcohol and low-sugar drinks, whereas Madeira wine is high in both – around 20% alcohol and 50 – 125 g of sugar per litre.  There are also pressures on land use. Historically, the farmers who grew the grapes did not own the land. This was a feudal system which has persisted, I was told at the vineyard, until a few generations back.

In recent times, the land has become more valuable as a place to build a house – or sell to a developer – than a place to grow grapes. Hence, less, not more land is available for use to grow the grapes the Madeira wine makers need. The Madeira Wine Company, which owns four of the Madeira wine brands, buys in around 90% of the grapes needed. Additionally, while traditionally, fathers passed on the farm to their sons and so on down the generations, young people nowadays do not necessarily see their future in farming.

One of the joys of my Madeira trip was taking a deeper dive into Madeira wine. After my own research at the Wine Festival and the visits I made to the Blandy Wine Lodge and the Quinta do Bispo vineyard, I found that wine tasting was one of the highlights of my visit to the island. Having enjoyed a range of Madeira wines, from a great cocktail made with Sercial, to pairings with prawns and other seafood dishes, to dessert pairings with Malmsey, I hope that younger generations of wine lovers continue to explore this versatile wine style so that it remains available to be enjoyed well into the future.

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