Rainwater Verdelho Lote Especial b-April-2024

A numbered one-off rather than part of the regular range: 980 bottles of 500 ml and 120 magnums, each individually numbered, bottled at Câmara de Lobos in April 2024 and signed on the back label by Ricardo Diogo and Sérgio Marques. The bottle in the photos is number 572.

The blend, per the back label, is 85% Verdelho aged in a wooden vat with 15% of a 2017 Sercial. The label gives a vintage only for the Sercial. Merchants selling the lot list the Verdelho as a 2014, but the bottle does not say so and Barbeito publishes nothing to confirm it. There is no age statement, and no canteiro or estufa claim either, just the vat. 18% alcohol, medium dry, 500 ml.

The interesting part is what the lot does with the name. Rainwater today sits near the bottom of the Madeira ladder: a traditional designation for a dry to medium dry wine of at least three years, in practice almost always Tinta Negra, usually with a spell in the estufa, and a style that has been out of fashion for decades. Barbeito went back to the grape the style was historically built on. The stated reference point is a Rainwater from 1825, and the back label summarises the research behind the reconstruction: paler in colour, delicate in texture, little oxidation.

The same label claims Rainwater was "the most prestigious style of wine in the US" through the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th. The version you find away from the label is narrower, the most prestigious style of Madeira in America, and much easier to defend.

Where the name comes from is genuinely unsettled. The plain explanation is descriptive: the wine was pale and light in texture, so it got called rainwater. The good story puts a shipment on the dock at Savannah, Georgia, consigned to the merchant William Neyle Habersham, left in the rain long enough for the casks to take on water and dilute the wine, which he is said to have complained about and then grown to like. A third account credits a Savannah wine merchant actually named Rainwater. The dilution version has a hole in it: Rainwater is bottled at the same strength as any other Madeira, which watered wine would not be, and the name was in use decades before the post-Civil-War merchant it sometimes gets pinned on.

Worth knowing on the subject of pale colour: Barbeito stopped using caramel as a colouring agent in 2001, when Ricardo Freitas made the call without waiting for his mother to agree to it. The pallor here is the wine's own.