Magnificent Madeira... And Sparkling Vodka?
29-Oct-08 - I love Madeira wine, always have. Indeed, in 1989, when I was writing a syndicated weekly column for local papers I confidently predicted that it was ready for a comeback, and that the 1990s would see a resurgence in demand for this fabulous wine. Sadly, it hasn't happened yet. Neither for Sherry, Port or Marsala, all of which I also love, but this is not about my inability to predict what the market will do. I think we can leave that to the financial institutions.
But anyway I was delighted to be invited to the Portuguese ambassador's residence in Belgrave Square (on the next corner from the Spanish Embassy) for a tasting of generic and colheita Madeiras. The day was sunny but cold, and the train was absolutely packed (half term!!). There was a scoutmaster with a gaggle of young scouts who all got a seat, but he didn't, and stood up all the way to Victoria - an hour and a half or more. Sadly, my creaky tin-man joints don't allow that so I travelled in first class. I had my credit-card and ticket ready to pay the difference but the guard lurked in his lobby for the whole journey and never showed his face.
The residence is another one of those grand corner mansions on Belgrave Square with elegant rooms hung with oil-paintings and tapestries, and there were six of the seven Madeira exporting companies present. There was a seminar conducted by Andrew Jefford although I didn't arrive early enough to go to it. However, there was plenty of room (and some nearby seats!) And I got stuck in. This is who was there and their best wines:
Henriques & Henriques (Mentzendorff) - one of the few producers with a substantial plantation of its own vineyards. I have happy memories of visiting there in 1999 for a tasting with chief-exec. John Cossart, who sadly died in February this year at the age of 63. I have only ever given 20/20 to two wines in my life, and one of them was an ancient vintage Madeira from Henriques & Henriques, tasted with John - bottled around 1850 at a time when it was classified as 'very old wine' (more than 50 years old) he calculated that it was probably from the historic 1795 vintage: 204 years old and still going strong. On a side issue, his death came only a month after that of Bill Baker of Reid Wines near Bath (at 53), another robust character: when I joined the wine trade in 1972 it was full of flambuoyant, larger-than-life characters such as they. Today, so much of the trade is 'corporate' men (and women) in suits.
There was none of the 1795 on show on the day but there were some spectacular vintages presided over by the beautiful Elizabeth Ferguson and the feisty Joanna Delaforce of Mentzendorff. My two 18/20 picks here were the 15-year-old Verdelho and the 15-year-old Boal. Both had that characteristic 'toffee-caramel' mid-palate, with more richness in Boal, of course, but the classic Madeira fresh acidity which marks it out from Oloroso Sherry and Marsala. Indeed, I bumped into the fragrant Patricia Stefanowicz of Plumpton College who reminded me of a seminar I'd conducted for the MW students a few years ago, comparing Port, Sherry and Madeira. The question was simply 'how do you distinguish between a sweet Oloroso and a Madeira?' The answer, of course, was acidity, and the freshness of acidity in most of the Madeira wines, especially the more modern styles, was very apparent in the samples on show.
I moved on to the Madeira Wine Company (aka Blandy's - John E. Fells) which was hosted by an old chum, Tim Stanley-Clarke (known to the trade as Tim Standing-Joke) who also represents Bouchard Père-et-Fils in Burgundy and Sir Cliff Richard's Quinta do Moinho estate in southern Portugal. Blandy's is famous for the 'Dukes' range (Clarence, Cumberland, Cambridge and Sussex, which in my day were Malmsey, Boal, Verdelho and Sercial respectively, but have for many years been made with the Tinta Negra Mole). Top picks here were the 1977s: Verdelho (excellent balance, lovely length and a hint of 'gamey' aldehyde) 17/20; and a sublime Bual (wonderful structure and an endless, delicious, rich finish) 18/20.
Onward to Pereira d'Oliveira (boveywines@btconnect.com). I have in my cellar at home a bottle of the 1968 Boal, a gift from the adega when I last visited, and the vintage of the year in which we got married. Although the 40th anniversary has passed (see post passim), we still haven't opened it as Jill is less than enthusiastic about anything sweet. However, Christmas will come and I'm sure that James and Claire will enjoy it. I also seem to remember buying a dozen of those weird hats that the embroidery ladies wear. Not sure what I meant to do with them, but they're still on top of the wardrobe. No less than three 18/20s here: Sercial 1971 (excellent, rich, spicy, long); Terrantez 1977 (big 'savoury' sweetness with a hint of pickled shallot - what was I thinking of when I wrote that? - Magnificent finish); and 1978 Boal (amazingly youthful, fresh and clean acidity and very long). These are fab wines.
Barbeito (Raymond Reynolds) was next. A wonderful selection of wines here including five 18/20s: Sercial 10-year-old (crisp freshness, muted sweetness); Boal 5-year-old (delicate, light, modern, fresh style); Malvasia 20-year-old (lovely, clean, fresh fruit, hot and spicy on the finish); Single Harvest 1997 'medium dry' (lovely, delicious, light, clean sweetness); and Bual 1982 (Gorgeous! Lovely 'sappy' fruit and an intensity akin to that of Rowntrees' Fruit Pastilles, long finish).
Justino Henriques (georgesbarbier@f2s.com) is one of the biggest stockholders on the island and has a range of wines from the affordable to the spectacular. My two best (both 18/20) were the 1996 Harvest (smoky, lovely rich, chocolatey finish); and the Terrantez 1978 (warm, slightly rubbery, coffee-toffee mid-palate and very long).
Finally H.M. Borges (020-8649-8005) - this is a fourth-generation business with some excellent wines, and Senhor Borges was very complimentary about my Portuguese feature in the summer issue of YES CHEF! Magazine (subscribe now!), perhaps because I visited several producers of wine, food and olive oil which he imports into the UK. So, no conflict of interest there, then. I marked two 18/20s - Harvest Sercial 1995 (spicy, fresh, long delicious) and Harvest Boal from the same year (warm, nutty, finishes dry and clean). Just at this point luncheon was announced and the room half emptied. Sr Borges nodded sagely "that'll be the journalists, then: always first for lunch." How do we get this reputation?
I didn't stay for lunch as I had an appointment in Soho to taste a new sparkling vodka (this is not a joke) at 15:00 and hoped that I could pull it forward and so get the train home before 17:00 which is always a nightmare. As it happened, I couldn't, because they'd already made the arrangements, but I made my way to Richmond Mews, just off Dean Street. The local pub had had a credit-card breakdown and were taking cash only (oh horrors - real money!) so I went into the bar of the Soho Theatre which was, rather sadly, all but empty. However, with an hour and a half to kill I enjoyed a large one, an excellent chicken 'sandwich' (actually a fajita-style wrap) with chips and a couple of glasses of the house Merlot (at £3 for a 175 ml glass, quite good value for money in Soho).
The venue was one of those discreetly-luxurious loft apartments inside an outwardly-austere warehouse building, and fortunately had a lift. I was met by Kash Javaid of Essence Communications, and he introduced me to Mattias Lindberger, who is the one of the founders of Camitz Vodka (the company is called Camitz and Lindberger). A bit of background here: Jill and I are both aficionados of vodka, and have worked our way through all the big brands and most of the niche brands (such as those available at the Vintage House in Old Compton Street, which is also where we used to buy our Kentucky Bourbon until they stopped delivering). Overall, and leaving aside a few niche vodkas such as the splendid Luksusowa, we have agreed to differ: her choice is Stolichnaya (wheat) and mine is Wyborowa (rye) but, in either case, a minimum 24 hours in the freezer is required for best effect. We are also purists in the respect that if we want to drink something we want to drink it. We don't want it mixed up with other stuff and especially not in cocktails. If it's worth drinking, then it's worth drinking by itself. (Slight hypocrisy here as Jill does enjoy a gin-and-tonic with ice and lemon as an apéritif and I do enjoy a whisky-and-soda with ice before dinner. In addition we have both been beguiled in the past by a well-made Bloody Mary, but that's all. Anything else, and anything at all containing vermouth, that vilest of drinks, is out).
So, I came to this tasting prepared to dislike Camitz. It was going to be a poncy, overpriced piece of marketing aimed at yuppies with more money than sense who would in any case mix it with something and destroy whatever taste it had. Whether that last thought is true may be a moot point, but I was stopped in my tracks when I actually saw the bottle and tasted the vodka. It's made in Sweden and sprang from an idea five years ago to make Absolut vodka sparkle. Since then, of course Vin & Sprit has sold Absolut to Pernod-Ricard and the whole thing has become impossibly corporate, so Camitz and Lindberger decided to create their own brand. "The sparkle shows up any defects in the spirit" said Mattias "so we had to make sure it was totally pure." They use Scandinavian winter wheat as the base with water from underground springs, and the spirit is distilled five times and then passes through ceramic filters and... Well it's carbonated. I don't know about you but carbonation is something I associate with the cheapest and nastiest sparkling wines, so what could it do for vodka?
Well, I was about to find out. I have to admit that the bottle is beautifully designed and the branding is printed directly on to the glass, rather than on a transparent label. The whole thing has been designed to look, well, spotlessly clean, and it works. It comes in a clear-glass Champagne-type bottle with a Champagne-type cork (interestingly, with a plastic seal on the bottom to keep the spirit away from the cork itself) and a Champagne-type foil capsule. It looks good, it looks quality, and start guessing the price now (Champagne, hint, hint).
All right, so what about the vodka. To my astonishment I found it was excellent: lovely, crisp, clean, fresh, immaculately chilled and unmistakably 'wheaty'. "But what", I hear you cry, "about the sparkle? What does that do for the taste?" Well, just as the sparkle in sparkling wines 'drives' the flavours of the wine, so this does with the basic flavours of the vodka. It's like... This is going to sound very silly. It's like the freshness of good toothpaste first thing in the morning. I don't mean that it tastes like toothpaste, of course, but that the fizz gives a tremendous 'refreshing' lift to the mouth, like well-chilled Manzanilla or Fino. This would make an absolutely splendid apéritif, and lift the spirits on the darkest and most depressing of winter nights.
I wish them all the luck in the world: it's off the wall, delicious, and something very rare - a genuinely new idea; even if those dreaded yuppies will destroy it by drowning it in ghastly Martini. And the price - "around the same as Grey Goose" says Mattias. Work it out for yourself.
Did just managed to catch the 16:17 to Worthing and it was, of course, a sardine tin. For the fourth time this week I sat in first class, credit card in hand, and for the fourth time the guard didn't stray from his cosy cabinet at the back. Pragmatic, I suppose, and I should be grateful, and in any case 'first class' on a Class 377 Southern train is indistinguishable from cattle class except for a white antimacassar, and a socket for your laptop. I slept most of the way home but the day was lifted for me as I stepped on to the platform at Worthing and an attractive young woman accosted me and said "you must be John Radford". I confessed that this was so. "I really enjoy your programme on Splash on a Sunday morning" she replied. A good ending to a long day.
But anyway I was delighted to be invited to the Portuguese ambassador's residence in Belgrave Square (on the next corner from the Spanish Embassy) for a tasting of generic and colheita Madeiras. The day was sunny but cold, and the train was absolutely packed (half term!!). There was a scoutmaster with a gaggle of young scouts who all got a seat, but he didn't, and stood up all the way to Victoria - an hour and a half or more. Sadly, my creaky tin-man joints don't allow that so I travelled in first class. I had my credit-card and ticket ready to pay the difference but the guard lurked in his lobby for the whole journey and never showed his face.
The residence is another one of those grand corner mansions on Belgrave Square with elegant rooms hung with oil-paintings and tapestries, and there were six of the seven Madeira exporting companies present. There was a seminar conducted by Andrew Jefford although I didn't arrive early enough to go to it. However, there was plenty of room (and some nearby seats!) And I got stuck in. This is who was there and their best wines:
Henriques & Henriques (Mentzendorff) - one of the few producers with a substantial plantation of its own vineyards. I have happy memories of visiting there in 1999 for a tasting with chief-exec. John Cossart, who sadly died in February this year at the age of 63. I have only ever given 20/20 to two wines in my life, and one of them was an ancient vintage Madeira from Henriques & Henriques, tasted with John - bottled around 1850 at a time when it was classified as 'very old wine' (more than 50 years old) he calculated that it was probably from the historic 1795 vintage: 204 years old and still going strong. On a side issue, his death came only a month after that of Bill Baker of Reid Wines near Bath (at 53), another robust character: when I joined the wine trade in 1972 it was full of flambuoyant, larger-than-life characters such as they. Today, so much of the trade is 'corporate' men (and women) in suits.
There was none of the 1795 on show on the day but there were some spectacular vintages presided over by the beautiful Elizabeth Ferguson and the feisty Joanna Delaforce of Mentzendorff. My two 18/20 picks here were the 15-year-old Verdelho and the 15-year-old Boal. Both had that characteristic 'toffee-caramel' mid-palate, with more richness in Boal, of course, but the classic Madeira fresh acidity which marks it out from Oloroso Sherry and Marsala. Indeed, I bumped into the fragrant Patricia Stefanowicz of Plumpton College who reminded me of a seminar I'd conducted for the MW students a few years ago, comparing Port, Sherry and Madeira. The question was simply 'how do you distinguish between a sweet Oloroso and a Madeira?' The answer, of course, was acidity, and the freshness of acidity in most of the Madeira wines, especially the more modern styles, was very apparent in the samples on show.
I moved on to the Madeira Wine Company (aka Blandy's - John E. Fells) which was hosted by an old chum, Tim Stanley-Clarke (known to the trade as Tim Standing-Joke) who also represents Bouchard Père-et-Fils in Burgundy and Sir Cliff Richard's Quinta do Moinho estate in southern Portugal. Blandy's is famous for the 'Dukes' range (Clarence, Cumberland, Cambridge and Sussex, which in my day were Malmsey, Boal, Verdelho and Sercial respectively, but have for many years been made with the Tinta Negra Mole). Top picks here were the 1977s: Verdelho (excellent balance, lovely length and a hint of 'gamey' aldehyde) 17/20; and a sublime Bual (wonderful structure and an endless, delicious, rich finish) 18/20.
Onward to Pereira d'Oliveira (boveywines@btconnect.com). I have in my cellar at home a bottle of the 1968 Boal, a gift from the adega when I last visited, and the vintage of the year in which we got married. Although the 40th anniversary has passed (see post passim), we still haven't opened it as Jill is less than enthusiastic about anything sweet. However, Christmas will come and I'm sure that James and Claire will enjoy it. I also seem to remember buying a dozen of those weird hats that the embroidery ladies wear. Not sure what I meant to do with them, but they're still on top of the wardrobe. No less than three 18/20s here: Sercial 1971 (excellent, rich, spicy, long); Terrantez 1977 (big 'savoury' sweetness with a hint of pickled shallot - what was I thinking of when I wrote that? - Magnificent finish); and 1978 Boal (amazingly youthful, fresh and clean acidity and very long). These are fab wines.
Barbeito (Raymond Reynolds) was next. A wonderful selection of wines here including five 18/20s: Sercial 10-year-old (crisp freshness, muted sweetness); Boal 5-year-old (delicate, light, modern, fresh style); Malvasia 20-year-old (lovely, clean, fresh fruit, hot and spicy on the finish); Single Harvest 1997 'medium dry' (lovely, delicious, light, clean sweetness); and Bual 1982 (Gorgeous! Lovely 'sappy' fruit and an intensity akin to that of Rowntrees' Fruit Pastilles, long finish).
Justino Henriques (georgesbarbier@f2s.com) is one of the biggest stockholders on the island and has a range of wines from the affordable to the spectacular. My two best (both 18/20) were the 1996 Harvest (smoky, lovely rich, chocolatey finish); and the Terrantez 1978 (warm, slightly rubbery, coffee-toffee mid-palate and very long).
Finally H.M. Borges (020-8649-8005) - this is a fourth-generation business with some excellent wines, and Senhor Borges was very complimentary about my Portuguese feature in the summer issue of YES CHEF! Magazine (subscribe now!), perhaps because I visited several producers of wine, food and olive oil which he imports into the UK. So, no conflict of interest there, then. I marked two 18/20s - Harvest Sercial 1995 (spicy, fresh, long delicious) and Harvest Boal from the same year (warm, nutty, finishes dry and clean). Just at this point luncheon was announced and the room half emptied. Sr Borges nodded sagely "that'll be the journalists, then: always first for lunch." How do we get this reputation?
I didn't stay for lunch as I had an appointment in Soho to taste a new sparkling vodka (this is not a joke) at 15:00 and hoped that I could pull it forward and so get the train home before 17:00 which is always a nightmare. As it happened, I couldn't, because they'd already made the arrangements, but I made my way to Richmond Mews, just off Dean Street. The local pub had had a credit-card breakdown and were taking cash only (oh horrors - real money!) so I went into the bar of the Soho Theatre which was, rather sadly, all but empty. However, with an hour and a half to kill I enjoyed a large one, an excellent chicken 'sandwich' (actually a fajita-style wrap) with chips and a couple of glasses of the house Merlot (at £3 for a 175 ml glass, quite good value for money in Soho).
The venue was one of those discreetly-luxurious loft apartments inside an outwardly-austere warehouse building, and fortunately had a lift. I was met by Kash Javaid of Essence Communications, and he introduced me to Mattias Lindberger, who is the one of the founders of Camitz Vodka (the company is called Camitz and Lindberger). A bit of background here: Jill and I are both aficionados of vodka, and have worked our way through all the big brands and most of the niche brands (such as those available at the Vintage House in Old Compton Street, which is also where we used to buy our Kentucky Bourbon until they stopped delivering). Overall, and leaving aside a few niche vodkas such as the splendid Luksusowa, we have agreed to differ: her choice is Stolichnaya (wheat) and mine is Wyborowa (rye) but, in either case, a minimum 24 hours in the freezer is required for best effect. We are also purists in the respect that if we want to drink something we want to drink it. We don't want it mixed up with other stuff and especially not in cocktails. If it's worth drinking, then it's worth drinking by itself. (Slight hypocrisy here as Jill does enjoy a gin-and-tonic with ice and lemon as an apéritif and I do enjoy a whisky-and-soda with ice before dinner. In addition we have both been beguiled in the past by a well-made Bloody Mary, but that's all. Anything else, and anything at all containing vermouth, that vilest of drinks, is out).
So, I came to this tasting prepared to dislike Camitz. It was going to be a poncy, overpriced piece of marketing aimed at yuppies with more money than sense who would in any case mix it with something and destroy whatever taste it had. Whether that last thought is true may be a moot point, but I was stopped in my tracks when I actually saw the bottle and tasted the vodka. It's made in Sweden and sprang from an idea five years ago to make Absolut vodka sparkle. Since then, of course Vin & Sprit has sold Absolut to Pernod-Ricard and the whole thing has become impossibly corporate, so Camitz and Lindberger decided to create their own brand. "The sparkle shows up any defects in the spirit" said Mattias "so we had to make sure it was totally pure." They use Scandinavian winter wheat as the base with water from underground springs, and the spirit is distilled five times and then passes through ceramic filters and... Well it's carbonated. I don't know about you but carbonation is something I associate with the cheapest and nastiest sparkling wines, so what could it do for vodka?
Well, I was about to find out. I have to admit that the bottle is beautifully designed and the branding is printed directly on to the glass, rather than on a transparent label. The whole thing has been designed to look, well, spotlessly clean, and it works. It comes in a clear-glass Champagne-type bottle with a Champagne-type cork (interestingly, with a plastic seal on the bottom to keep the spirit away from the cork itself) and a Champagne-type foil capsule. It looks good, it looks quality, and start guessing the price now (Champagne, hint, hint).
All right, so what about the vodka. To my astonishment I found it was excellent: lovely, crisp, clean, fresh, immaculately chilled and unmistakably 'wheaty'. "But what", I hear you cry, "about the sparkle? What does that do for the taste?" Well, just as the sparkle in sparkling wines 'drives' the flavours of the wine, so this does with the basic flavours of the vodka. It's like... This is going to sound very silly. It's like the freshness of good toothpaste first thing in the morning. I don't mean that it tastes like toothpaste, of course, but that the fizz gives a tremendous 'refreshing' lift to the mouth, like well-chilled Manzanilla or Fino. This would make an absolutely splendid apéritif, and lift the spirits on the darkest and most depressing of winter nights.
I wish them all the luck in the world: it's off the wall, delicious, and something very rare - a genuinely new idea; even if those dreaded yuppies will destroy it by drowning it in ghastly Martini. And the price - "around the same as Grey Goose" says Mattias. Work it out for yourself.
Did just managed to catch the 16:17 to Worthing and it was, of course, a sardine tin. For the fourth time this week I sat in first class, credit card in hand, and for the fourth time the guard didn't stray from his cosy cabinet at the back. Pragmatic, I suppose, and I should be grateful, and in any case 'first class' on a Class 377 Southern train is indistinguishable from cattle class except for a white antimacassar, and a socket for your laptop. I slept most of the way home but the day was lifted for me as I stepped on to the platform at Worthing and an attractive young woman accosted me and said "you must be John Radford". I confessed that this was so. "I really enjoy your programme on Splash on a Sunday morning" she replied. A good ending to a long day.
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