"Have Some Madeira my Dear..."

You have to be over 60 to remember that line of a song. Tomorrow we will be in Madeira. Actually we will be in Funchal on the Island of Madeira. [Funchal is a form of the word fennel that grows on the island.] Oddly that name has always sounded Asian to me.

Madeira is part of an archipelago about 400 miles out in the Atlantic from Africa. Although the islands are about 14,000,000 years old it was only discovered by Portuguese sailors around 1400 and has been Portuguese ever since. They bumped into it as they did their early exploration of the 'New World". The winds and current apparently took the ships down south a bit from Portugal to about Madeira and took them westerly across to lower North America. It was the easiest and possibly the only way to get to North America in those days.

Do you realize that much of the need for exploration was caused by people trying to get spices etc. to Europe? The Ottomans had the traditional overland route to the 'east' locked up. That route was through what is now Turkey, Russia and Mongolia and China etc. The Ottoman made sure that goods going through their territory were well taxed and using their caravans etc. So, as is the case even today, people will try and find another way to get what they want and do not like a monopoly. Hence the search for the 'east' via going west. Also remember when Columbus hit North America he thought that he had hit China, the fabled 'east'.

Madeira is almost exactly on the same latitude as Bermuda, Atlanta and Phoenix so it a somewhat popular place for Europeans to have a beach vacation. It does not have what we who vacation in The Hawaiian Islands call good beaches but they are always full of sun seeking Europeans.

Madeira wine is to me, an acquired taste. There is an interesting history to Madeira wines. Our friend Henry the Navigator had grape vines imported to Madeira. [1500's.] As Madeira developed it's wine industry is was found that the wines were subject to heat and much jostling on their long ocean voyages to far off countries. The wines took on a somewhat different taste during that voyage, and that taste became popular. The end result was that sometimes, casks of Madeira wines were put in holds of ships that were bouncing around in the hot climate, to sort of 'age' the wine. Eventually as early as 1794 a technique was developed using ovens to 'cure' young wines to give them the 'Madeira' flavour. Strange but true.

Then at the end of the 18th century, when Napoleon's brother Joseph blockaded the European route to Madeira, they began to add distilled spirits to the wine to prevent spoilage. Eventually they added generous amounts of brandy to the wine. It is what is called a 'fortified wine'. It packs a punch. Hence the song, 'Have Some Madeira my Dear': an enticement by anxious suitors to naive ladies to have a very tiny amount of wine in the hopes of lowering their resistance.

Tomorrow in Madeira is our last European port of the cruise. The weather looks good and Madeira is a very picturesque island full of colour, life and flowers, it is also springtime. It should be a nice way to wind down from the cruise.

I am sure that there will be more than a few bottles of Madeira wine bought on board tomorrow afternoon, and, a fair amount of it undrunk when we finish the cruise. A glass of Madeira is interesting, but not the kind of thing to have a few glasses of. The merchants in town are very generous in their free samples, and after a few 'fortified' wines the need to purchase seems to overtake people. None for us though, been there, done that.

At least that is the way I understand things to be.

The one photo was taken by Jim in Gibraltar during my quest for the Smokey Joe restaurant. The man next to me was pleased to talk about it and took us up the street to where it was. He made my day!