Arizona Stronghold Vineyards enlists the elements to make the state’s first Madeira.
This is a story about fortified wine – and a barrel with googly eyes. It starts in the late 15th century, when Spanish and Portugese wine would routinely spoil during the long, hot voyage to Great Britain or the Americas. The solution: Fortify the barrels with a neutral grape spirit, such as brandy. Et voilà. Instead of vinegar, the beating sun and nautical jostling created something delicious – nutty, caramel-toned Madeira. Five hundred years later, Arizona Stronghold Vineyards winemaker Jason McCluskey got the itch to bottle Arizona’s first Madeira. Winery owner Terry Glomski was keen on the idea. “Winemakers are artists and want to mess around,” Glomski says. “And we like it when Jason messes around.” So, one day in 2023, McCluskey picked a barrel and made his Madeira move.
Traditional Madeira is typically made from a red grape, Negra Mole, but McCluskey elected to use Malvasia Bianca and Muscat, both white varietals with sweet, floral aromas popular with bees and wasps at ASV’s Willcox vineyard. “The swarms we get from those grapes is incredible.”
Fortuitously, ASV also had some brandy handy, distilled from Chardonnay grapes almost a decade ago. “It was just chilling out in our warehouse in a stainless steel keg, so very convenient.”
McCluskey blended his Malvasia and Muscat with the brandy to arrest fermentation, achieving a sugar level (70 grams per liter) deemed favorable for Madeira. “From there, we parked it outside, in a big barrel we named Darrell. Someone slapped googly eyes on it, so it looks pretty funny.”
Starting in autumn 2023, the wine, dubbed Saguaro Blossom, spent eight months outdoors in Darrell the Barrel, oxidizing and developing honey and luscious bruised apple notes via the “slow ingress of oxygen” and “extreme night-day diurnal shifts” at ASV’s Camp Verde crush facility.
Satisfied with the Madeira’s progress, McCluskey botted half of the batch this summer, topping off the barrel with new Madeira to create a “quasi-solera system” that preserves traces of the original batch in perpetuity. “We don’t have a set timeline for the next bottling,” he says. “That’s the beauty of [fortified wine]. You can let it go bad a little bit. It’s supposed to do that.”
Arizona Stronghold Vineyards Saguaro Blossom Madeira
$22. Available at ASV Scottsdale and Cottonwood tasting rooms.
