Blandy's - Madeira Bual 1920 Vintage

Blandy's traces its founding to 1811, when John Blandy first arrived on the island, and the family remains the only one among the Madeira trade's original founders still owning and operating its original company. That continuity was tested through the difficult years of the mid 1920s, when a collapsing export market forced the island's producers to unite under the Madeira Wine Association, a partnership Blandy's has honored ever since while continuing to work with all of Madeira's principal grape varieties.

This vintage Bual dates to 1920, made from grapes grown in the island's steep, terraced volcanic soils and hand harvested due to the difficulty of mechanizing such terrain. Bual sits between the drier Sercial and Verdelho and the richer Malmsey in Madeira's sweetness spectrum, and this bottling underwent an extraordinarily long maturation in wood, allowing it to concentrate and intensify over the better part of a century into something close to a reduction of the wine itself.

Now a century old, the wine shows a deep golden color with green tinges at the rim and an exuberant bouquet of dried figs, walnuts, caramelized citrus rind, and warm spice, along with hints of cedar and smoke. On the palate it is full bodied and searingly concentrated, its sweetness and acidity in harmony through a finish that lingers for minutes. Pour it alongside blue cheese or a rich dessert, or simply savor it on its own.