Duke of Clarence

Duke of Clarence is Blandy's Rich, and at three years it sits on the entry rung: three years is the legal minimum for any Madeira. The producer's technical sheet gives the grape as Tinta Negra, the workhorse of modern Madeira, and the style as Doce / Rich; the Ukrainian importer sticker puts the variety at 100%. The wine belongs to a range the house calls "The Dukes' Collection", and the Portuguese back label ties the name to the story that the Duke of Clarence died in a barrel of sweet Madeira.

The technical sheet describes fermentation on the skins with natural yeast at 24 to 26 C in temperature-controlled stainless steel, arrested by fortification with grape spirit at 96% v/v. The wine then goes through estufagem, the heat-accelerated method used for entry-tier Madeira: a cyclic heating and cooling between 45 and 50 C over three months, after which the wine is aged in oak casks. It is the fast counterpart to canteiro, the attic method where casks age at ambient temperature. On terroir the sheet is general rather than site-specific: Tinta Negra does well on Cambisol soils, thick and fine-textured with medium organic matter, a type it puts at 11% of Madeira's soils up to 700 metres, with the vines exposed to Atlantic wind and the cooler temperatures of those altitudes.

Of the analysis on the sheet, only part can be read with confidence: 19% alcohol, total acidity 5.5 g/L, density 1030 g/L. The remaining figures are printed transposed - volatile acidity and reducing sugars carry each other's values - so the residual sugar of this Rich is not recoverable from the document. Bottling winemaker Francisco Albuquerque. The importer sticker gives the bottling date as 6 February 2024.