TN 1792 Solera Madeira

WINE TALK
1

TN 1792 Solera madeira.
I had the pleasure tonight to meet Josh Wertlieb and his friend Sean Corrigan tonight at my house.
Josh as many know was in the wine importing and distribution business in Boston and has recently moved to the desert in Scottsdale.
Sean brought a little surprise, a Solera Madeira from 1792. Yes, 16 years after our Nation’s independence.
The Madeira had good color and clarity. It still had some sweet fruit but was slightly astingent. Considering it’s age it was a worthy sipping wine and by far the oldest sample I have ever had the pleasure to consume. I believe the bottle was filled in 1956.
I opened a 1995 Troplong Mondot that was horribly corked. headbang hitsfan
It was fun talking to both of these great guys and look forward to going at it again with them.

2

Hello Jack,

Fascinating wines, these ancient Madeiras, many thanks for the note. A couple of years ago I tried a 1792 solera and a 1792 single vintage side by side and, whilst they were clearly quite tired, the solera seemed noticeably further away from death. It is interesting and thought-provoking to try wines of this advanced age, but as far as drinking them for pleasure goes I’d rather have something about a century and a half younger.

Cheers,
David.

3

David last year I had the pleasure to taste a 1852 Solera Vintage Madeira that offered much more drinking pleasure. The historical significance of this wine however was not lost on me. [worship.gif]

4

Wow…drinking the same wine that Thomas Jefferson did. That is rather impressive and VERY COOL. Thanks for the note!

5

Glad you got to meet Sean, I’ve known him for several years and visited him a couple times when he lived in Boston. Not to mention spending a week with him in Portugal on a Port trip. He’s a crack up, not to mention being very generous, and I am glad he finally lives closer so we can hang out more often.

6

Wow…drinking the same wine that Thomas Jefferson did. That is rather impressive and VERY COOL. Thanks for the note!<<<<<

Also inaccurate [wink.gif]. A solera means that the blend was STARTED in 1792, but it may have literally had wine added to it for many years thereafter - some Soleras in Madeira have continued for 50 or more years in terms of vintage additions.

7

True, although my understanding is that in Madeira, and unlike Sherry soleras, there are limits to how much drawing off/topping up can be done, and effectively, the solera must contain at least 50% of the base wine. I’m sure there are others here who know far more about this than I do. Certainly there are Madeira experts who feel that solera Madeiras are generally better than true vintage wines.

8

Hello Craig,

The limits for Sherry and Madeira are pretty similar (and there are limits for Sherry). A maximum of 30% of a solera cask can be drawn off any year to be replaced by wine from the most recent vintage. I am sure there is a Wine Berserker maths whiz who could calculate how much of the original vintage remained in the 1792 if it had 30% taken off each year until it was bottled in 1956 (show your working, please:), I couldn’t.

This 30% figure is quite important in Sherry. As blending different vintages together is seen by the Spanish as significant in achieving the special character of Sherry, Sherry producers are only allowed to sell a maximum of 30% of their in cask stock each year. Serious producers will never sell this much of their wine, the increased age of their soleras being essential to making higher quality wines. Given this, it is easy to see that making Sherry is an expensive, time-consuming process and as such the low prices the wines generally go for make them brilliant bargains. A bottle of Manzanilla La Gitana from Hidalgo costs around £8 (~$12) here; when I pull a bottle of it out of the fridge to drink on a summer’s afternoon I always marvel that the wine is so cheap considering the average age of its components and the investment that requires.

Cheers,
David.

PS. Yes, single vintage Sherries do exist, but these are a relatively new phenomenon. They can be brilliant; at last year’s Wine and Spirits Trade Fair I had a Hidalgo 1986 Oloroso which blew my mind with its complexity, style and charm.

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Craig, as David points out, the only limit on what can be drawn down re: a solera is an annual one. If you think about it, the longer a solera is continued, the less there is of the starting vintage (which is one very logical reason why David thought the 1792 solera tasted much fresher than the vintage 1792 - it was fresher).

Now what we don’t know about Jack’s particular bottle is how long the solera itself was active, i.e. just because the wine was bottled in 1956 doesn’t mean that new wine was being added to this mix from 1792 to 1956 - in fact, that is highly improbable and in all likelihood the solera stopped sometime in the 1800’s.

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BTW, Craig, what Madeira experts prefer soleras to vintage wine as a rule? Clearly from a market pricing perspective that is not the case, but I’ve actually never seen anyone make the case for solera over vintage (that of course is not to say that an individual solera couldn’t be better than an individual vintage wine on any given day), and I’d be curious to know what his or her rationale was. Relative QPR?

11

Jack,
Who was the producer of your Solera? I’ve had good experiences with Cossart Gordon soleras (oldest one to date was an 1808, which was as good as a very good vintage Madeira). Leacock has also been good. Henriques & Henriques less so.

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See Ken!!!

neener

[ken.gif]

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Hello Linda,

I don’t follow, am I being thick?

We say maths in England rather than math. Over here math is what Catholics with a lisp attend.

Cheers,
David.

14

I don’t think that t he math is very difficult, but I am not a mathematician. Assuming 30% removed yearly, and 70% of the mix remains each year, the reduction of the earliest Madeira should be:

1.00
0.7
0.49
0.343
0.2401
0.16807
0.117649
0.0823543
0.05764801
0.040353607
0.028247525
0.019773267
0.013841287
0.009688901
0.006782231
0.004747562
0.003323293
0.002326305
0.001628414
0.00113989
0.000797923
0.000558546
0.000390982
0.000273687
0.000191581

I simply multiplied by .7 for the reduction. By year 14, the original Madeira is less than 1% of the mix. Subsequent additions reduce even faster, since they start at 30% of the solution.

0.3
0.21
0.147
0.1029
0.07203
0.050421
0.0352947
0.02470629
0.017294403
0.012106082
0.008474257
0.00593198
0.004152386
0.00290667
0.002034669
0.001424268
0.000996988
0.000697892
0.000488524
0.000341967
0.000239377
0.000167564
0.000117295

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Hi Jeff,

Thanks for reminding me how to do these things. I whipped out the calculator and worked out how much 1792 would be in the solera if it was refreshed with younger wine until 1956. The proportion is 3.94x10^-24%. So only a homoeopathic dose of the original wine left.

Cheers,
David

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The Madeira regulations are quite different. Looks like this bottle predated the newest regulations; however, so it’s unknown how it was handled. In Madeira, a solera cannot be refreshed indefinitely. Only four refreshments are allowed and there are maximum amounts which can be removed and minimal amounts of time between refreshments.

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Assuming the following description (which was in the Madeira Wine Guide) is accurate, older Madeira soleras would have been refreshed at least 10 times.


In this type of wine you will find a solera system with some parallels to the making of Sherry or Malaga. The production of the early soleras went as follows: You take a tenth of the contents of a cask and replace it with the same amount of a younger wine. You can repeat this another nine times, until you changed the whole cask volume once. The solera will then be closed. Since a solera, operated in this fashion, can produce only little amounts of wine, many producers more and more turned to a solera system like in the Sherry region, where you can produce much more wine since you are allowed to refill younger wine as many times as you like. Modern soleras therefore do sometimes not seem to be as good as the old ones used to be.

Solera Madeira still is something special. The eleven different wines harmonize over the years and give a good mixture of the depth of old wines with some freshness of the younger wines. The year named on the bottle indicates the starting date of a solera. When you buy a solera 1852 only a small part of the bottle will be wine from the year 1852 but the other wines are of high age too. It has to be mentioned though, that solera wines are not allowed by the EU regulations, but you can still buy them on the island.

18

[rofl.gif]

I used “maths” the other day and Dr Ken thought I was quite daft.