Madeira: The Romance of a Great Wine

A gift from my good friends Bill & Rebeca Cope

Grove Koger

Today’s post originally appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of the late-lamented magazine Boise.

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Every wine comes with a life story. Some are modest and unassuming, some grand. Thanks to their exotic origin and romantic history, the many varieties of Madeira tend toward the grand end of the spectrum, but that doesn’t mean that they’re hard to find or necessarily pricey. There are Madeiras to fit any budget and any taste. Dry or sweet, they add a genial note to any occasion—or, better still, any non-occasion.

The island of Madeira lies some 400 miles off the coast of Northwest Africa. It and nearby Porto Santo may be the Romans’ Islands of the Blest, but their modern history dates from their discovery by Portuguese explorers early in the fifteenth century. The name Madeira means “wood” in Portuguese, and fires started on the heavily forested island are said to have burned for seven years. The story is probably apocryphal, but it points to a very real situation: the island had to be cleared in order for its settlers to grow their wheat. Before long, sugarcane replaced wheat as a major crop, and was replaced in turn by grapes.

Madeira became a regular port of call, but when ship captains complained that the casks of wine they had taken aboard there were going bad, the island’s vintners began adding spirits distilled from cane sugar as a preservative. As luck would have it, the more robust tipple held up and improved in flavor, apparently from the heat and constant motion of travel through tropical waters. The fact was discovered when casks were returned unsold, and although vinho da roda (“wine of the round trip”) soon became a hit, the method involved was cumbersome. The solution was to store the casks of wine in sun-heated rooms known as estufas. In addition, encouraging oxidation by exposing the wine itself to air was found to replicate the rough handling it underwent aboard ship. A consequence of all this “mistreatment” was that the wine maintained its quality long after opening.

During the eighteenth century, Madeira wine (fortified by then with brandy) was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, from the great houses of England to the more modest homes of the colonies. It was the drink with which the signers of the Declaration of Independence are said to have toasted their achievement. However, disease decimated Madeira’s vineyards during the nineteenth century. Further ups and downs followed, but the latter years of the twentieth century saw the replanting of the so-called noble varieties that had made the wine so famous. Alas for romance, it had by then become common to put most Madeiras through an artificial heating process.

Madeira ages better than almost any other wine, prompting one expert to refer to “immortal Madeira.” It was a bottle of the vintage 1792, bottled in 1840, that was opened for Sir Winston Churchill when he visited the island in 1950. Upon learning what it was that the assembled company would be drinking, the great man insisted on serving his fellow guests himself. “Do you realize,” he asked, “that when this wine was made, Marie Antoinette was alive?”

For a time, many superior Madeiras were blended according to a solera process in which successive casks were filled over a period of years, the oldest tapped for a certain amount of wine (which was then bottled) and topped up from the next oldest, which were then … You get the idea. After the youngest casks were tapped, they were filled with even younger wine. Although the percentage of older wine in any particular cask decreased year by year, it never quite disappeared. Thus the date of a bottle of Madeira that has passed through the solera process refers not to the vintage but to the oldest wine it contains.

Of course bottles of great age are rare and come at great price. The British firm Finest & Rarest, for instance, once offered selections from the “Leacock Cache,” said to have been “uplifted directly from the cellars of the family mansion” in Madeira’s capital city of Funchal.” A bottle of the solera 1808 from the cache could once have been yours for a mere £1,600, worldwide shipping included, but, alas, it has been sold. But don’t despair! As the company notes, its stock of Madeira changes almost every week, and potential buyers are urged to contact it for the lastest price list.

While the term “vintage” is generally reserved for dated Madeiras aged at least twenty years in cask, newer designations—including Colheita and Harvest—have been introduced recently for younger dated wines. Other Madeiras are graded from the rare “Extra Reserve” through “Special Reserve” down to quite affordable “Finest.” Indications of age in these categories refers to the youngest wine in the blend, although they may well contain much older ones.

Mention of the Leacock family raises the intriguing fact that many of the best Madeira cellars have been associated with British families. The founder of the Leacock dynasty arrived on the island in 1741, while the first Blandy arrived in 1807 and settled permanently in 1811. Today Blandy’s is the only British firm involved in the early Madeira wine trade to remain in its founding family’s hands.

“A Sledge with Pipe of Madeira Wine,” photograph by Mildred Cossart from *Madeira: Old and New,* by W.H. Koebel (1909)

When Madeira’s vineyards were replanted in the twentieth century, it was generally with the Sercial, Verdelho, Bual and Malmsey varieties. Sercial yields a dry wine normally served as an aperitif, while the others produce successively sweeter wines. Madeira expert Michael Broadbent recommends 10-year-old Verdelho as usually being “remarkably good.”

If you find Sercial a bit too dry and Malmsey a bit too sweet, then you may also want to consider the inexpensive, medium-dry variety known as “Rainwater.” Whence the name? According to the most common explanation, it seems that once upon a time some casks awaiting shipment to Savannah were rained upon, with the result that the wood of the casks absorbed the water and diluted the wine. In another one of those providential accidents to which Madeira seems prone, this lighter, raisiny version has been popular with Americans ever since.

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The Beguiling Ippolitov-Ivanov

Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, *Coming out of the Turkish School*

Grove Koger

November 19 is the birthday of Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, who was born on this day in 1859 in Gatchina, a town in Russia near St. Petersburg.

There are any number of supposedly “great” composers whose works leave me cold, and although Ippolitov-Ivanov was distinctly second-rank, several of his compositions are beguiling, and I’m always happy to be beguiled. Perhaps you are too.

Ippolitov-Ivanov studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and quite a bit of the latter’s lush orientalism can be heard in his pupil’s works. The quality was enhanced by Ippolitov-Ivanov’s sojourn in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of the Imperial Russian territory of Georgia, from 1882 to 1893. There he was employed as the conductor of the city’s opera and the director of its own conservatory, and began to appreciate the rich musical traditions of the Caucasus.

The composer became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory in 1893, and, with the backing of fellow composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, became its director in 1905. His Symphony No. 1, Op. 46, dates from 1908, and while it’s well-constructed, it lies just on the far side of memorability. In 1924, Ippolitov-Ivanov returned for a time to Georgia, overseeing the reorganization of what would become the Georgian State Conservatory.

Ippolitov-Ivanov’s interest in the Turkic music of the Caucasus led to the composition of his most famous work, the first suite of his Caucasian Sketches, Op. 10,from 1894. Made up of four sections, it begins with “In a Mountain Pass,” an evocation of the wild grandeur of Caucasus Mountains. It’s followed by “In a Village,” “In a Mosque,” and, finally, the stirring “Procession of the Sardar” (a Sardar being a Persian nobleman or dignitary). You can hear a good performance on Naxos 8.553405 by the National Symphony of Ukraine under the baton of Arthur Fagen here.

Edwin Lord Weeks, *Figures in the Courtyard of a Mosque*

The piece was followed two years later by a second suite of Caucasian Sketches, Op. 42, subtitled Iveria—a reference to the traditional name of Georgia. However, the suite’s introduction, “Lamentation of Princess Ketevana,” is simply unmemorable, and, to me at least, it’s remained so after repeated listening. My mind wanders as the music meanders on. The suite does generate some energy in its subsequent movements, however, particularly in the third, “Lezghinka,” and the last, “Georgian March,” but …

Ippolitov-Ivanov’s musical outlook doesn’t seem to have changed over the decades, and he apparently weathered without serious incident the often-violent cultural transformations that followed the Russian Revolution. Before and after that revolution, he wrote several more short works approaching his first suite of Caucasian Sketches in color and excitement, although they’re little-known. These include his Armenian Rhapsody on National Themes, Op. 48 (1895 or 1909); his Turkish Fragments, Op. 62 (1930); his Turkish March, Op. 55 (1926 or 1932); his Orchestral Suite No. 4: On the Steppes of Turkmenistan, Op. 65 (1935); and his Orchestral Suite No. 5: Musical Paintings from Uzbekistan, Op. 69 (1935).

Franz Roubaud, *Circassian Riders at the Ford*

I’ve also seen mentions of a four-movement work called Karelia, which may be a reference to a second symphony whose score was apparently lost or never published, and a Suite Catalane, which doesn’t seem to have been recorded. The title is presumably a reference to Catalonia, but, as far as I know, the composer never actually visited the Catalonian region of Spain.

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A Good Start

Grove Koger

A couple of weeks ago I discussed the artists who had, over the decades, illustrated H.G. Wells’ 1897-98 novel The War of the Worlds. I like the work’s opening paragraph so much that I wanted to include it, but it didn’t fit it in very well. However, the paragraph (which you can read here, along with the rest of the novel) stuck in my mind, and I realized pretty quickly that there are any number of books with striking opening lines or paragraphs. Today I’m going to share the best ones that come to mind, beginning with D.H. Lawrence.

I don’t have any interest in Lawrence’s wordy novels, but I think he was a first-rate travel writer, and Sea and Sardinia (1921) may be his best book in that genre. In fact, its first line is a small masterpiece, and it could stand as a tribute to travel itself: “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.” Has anyone ever written a better sentence? (I almost adopted part of it for my 2002 book When the Going Was Good, but, obviously, chose another phrase.) Lawrence continues, a little unnecessarily I think: “And what is more, move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.” Yet his first sentence says it all.

Kingsley Amis is the author of the funniest book in the English language, Lucky Jim (1954). He’s also the co-author of the 1965 novel I’d rate as the second-funniest, The Egyptologists, which he wrote with his friend Robert Conquest. The latter work begins with a sentence as simple as Lawrence’s: “Their lives were built on caution.” I laugh every time I read it. The Egyptologists is about a small band of men who pretend, in the most agonizingly boring manner imaginable, to attend periodic meetings devoted to Egyptology in order to cheat on their wives. Amis has a reputation as a male chauvinist, and I’m told that some women don’t find him all that funny, which is their loss. However, you (and they) may be glad to know that the pseudo-Egyptologists are actually fooling themselves. Well, what’s new? you ask. Or, as the novel itself asks in conclusion, “Well, what next?”

Lawrence Durrell begins his novel Justine (1957), the first volume of his “Alexandria Quartet,” with this dazzling passage: “The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes …” By “planes,” a reference that some readers have found puzzling, the erudite Englishman was referring to the trees known to most North Americans as sycamores. In any case, the passage is a promise of the wide-ranging sensory delights to come.

Ford Madox Ford opens his 1915 novel The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion with a sentence that might have been designed to discourage readers: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” But if you persevere, you’ll realize at some point that Ford’s narrator is strikingly unreliable, and that the novel may be the best analysis of self-deception in the English language. (Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t sad.) Ford actually wanted to use the title The Saddest Story, but, given the fact that World War I had begun only a few months before, his publishers dissuaded him. Instead, Ford suggested, with more than a little irony, The Good Soldier. A panel of distinguished literary figures, including novelist Graham Greene, subscribed to a statement declaring it to be “one of the fifteen or twenty greatest novels produced in English in our [i.e., the twentieth] century.”

American novelist James M. Cain wrote short, dark studies of greed and lust in razor-sharp prose. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936) are his best-known novels, and both begin with starkly memorable sentences. In the case of The Postman, we read, “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” And in Double Indemnity, we read, “I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywoodland. I decided to run over there. That was how I came to this House of Death, that you’ve been reading about in the papers.”

Hollywoodland, of course, was the original name of Hollywood, and the famous hillside sign advertising it was erected in 1923. The last four letters were dropped in 1949. It’s since become an iconic landmark, and has figured in numerous books and films, symbolizing as it does a melancholy mixture of bright hopes and broken dreams.

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Edgard Varèse’s New Worlds of Sound

Grove Koger

November 6 is the anniversary of the death of one of the twentieth century’s most important composers, Edgard Varèse (ed grd vr ez), who died on this day in 1965 in New York City.

Born in Paris in 1883, Varèse spent most of his early years in Italy with paternal relatives. He composed his first work—an opera since lost—twelve years later, in 1895, but he was forced by his practical father to study engineering. Having returned to the French capital in 1903, however, he soon enrolled at the Schola Cantorum de Paris. His early influences included an array of notable composers, including Albert Roussel and Charles-Marie Widor (who were his teachers), as well as Erik Satie, Richard Strauss, and Ferrucio Busoni. Another influence was Claude Debussy, who told Varèse, “You have a right to compose what you want to, and the way you want to, if the music … is your own.”

After serving with the French army in World War I, Varèse moved to the United States. There he helped found the International Composers Guild and, over time, conducted works by a myriad of illustrious, forward-looking contemporaries, including Bela Bartok, Darius Milhaud, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky.

Varèse’s early works were lost, many of them in a warehouse fire, but he seems to have regarded the loss as fortuitous. With Amériques, he said, he had begun to write his “own music.” The work reminds me of my first, disorienting visit to Manhattan decades ago, but to Varèse himself, the title was not particularly geographic, and instead referred, simply, to “new worlds.”

But the history of these “new worlds” is a little complicated.

Varèse composed the original version, for a very large orchestra, including 11 percussionists playing a variety of instruments (including a wind machine and a siren) in 1921. Leopold Stokowsky conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in the first performance in 1926, but the composer revised the work a year later. The revised version calls for fewer players and is a bit more compact, but it, like the original, includes a wide array of percussion instruments, including that siren.

Amériques lasts about 23 minutes, and is made up of a series of repeated motifs that build energy over the course of the piece. Its rhythm and volume are almost frighteningly relentless, as if the entire orchestra were speeding out of control. The result may not be to everyone’s taste, but it represents a musical step forward, one that avoids what seems to me to be the sterile neoclassicism that composers such as Stravinsky had embraced. Varèse thought of music as “living matter,” and it’s hard to imagine anything more alive than this astounding work.

There’s general agreement that the revised version of Amériques is an improvement—general, but not complete. Producer Andrew Cornall and conductor Riccardo Chailly have championed the original version, and Chailly conducted the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in playing it for a 2-CD London recording of the composer’s complete works. You can listen to that recording, which is based on an “edition prepared from the original manuscript by Chou Wen-chung,” while following the daunting score, on YouTube here. In length, it runs to 24:38, and London describes it as the world premiere recording. As producer Andrew Cornall explains, “the revelation of the great sonic and textual differences between the original … and the revised version[s] convinced me that we should record only the original.”

In this case, however, I have to agree with the majority. In terms of the performances I’ve heard, the revised version simply packs more punch. You can watch Alain Altinoglu conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony in a strong performance here on YouTube. Better still, you can hear Christoph von Dohnányi conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in an outstanding 1994 London recording here. The playing is aggressive, and the siren, in particular, is loud and emphatic. (Isn’t that the way a siren should sound?) In any case, Amériquesis one of the twentieth century’s most important musical works, and a polished performance such as this one makes its claim clear.

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Grove Koger

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