Sercial

Sercial makes the driest and most austere of the four classic Madeiras, and its Portuguese mainland name gives the game away: Esgana Cão means dog strangler, a reference to acidity severe enough to make the description feel earned.

It is planted on the highest and coolest sites on the island, often on north-facing terraces above 600 metres, where it ripens late and reluctantly and retains ferocious acidity. That acidity is exactly what the Madeira process requires. The wine will be fortified, heated for years and deliberately oxidised, and without a formidable acid backbone it would emerge flat and cooked rather than piercing.

The finished wine is pale amber, bone dry, and extremely tangy: green apple, lime peel, almond, smoke and a saline, mineral finish that goes on for an improbable length of time. There is a nuttiness from the oxidative ageing but very little of the caramel richness that the sweeter Madeiras develop.

It is the Madeira to serve as an aperitif, chilled, in place of a fino sherry — a role it performs extremely well and is rarely asked to perform.

Like all Madeira it is effectively indestructible. Bottles from the nineteenth century remain not merely drinkable but vivid, and once opened a bottle will hold for months without deteriorating, which makes the wine unusually practical for anyone who does not want to finish a bottle in an evening.

Plantings are small; Sercial is the rarest of the four noble varieties after Terrantez.