MADEIRA, THE ISLAND VINEYARD

By Noël COSSART

Expanded Second Edition, with new material by Emanuel Berk

340 Pages; published by The Rare Wine Company, Sonoma, California

Currently $32 plus postage

Noêl Cossart (1907-1987), was for 40 years the managing director of Cossart, Gordon, perhaps the largest and most important of Madeira's senior wine merchants. Following his retirement to Suffolk, and encouraged by Michael Broadbent, he wrote what has always since been the definitive book on the magical wines of this obscure atlantic island for Christie's Wine Publications. It was first published in 1984. For years it has been out of print.

Manny Berk of the Rare Wine Company, long a passionate devotee of the island's wines – and the largest stockholder of old and rare madeiras outside the island itself - has now, to our infinite gratitude, produced a handsome second edition of Madeira, The Island Vineyard. It comes with a number of very useful appendices, not least a marvelously comprehensive list of the prices vintage and old solera madeiras have fetched at auction over the years.

This is a lovingly produced book, replete with illustrations. It is also, and most importantly, a book written by an insider. At one stage, and quite humbly, Cossart assets that he knows more about madeira than any one alive. This is not an idle boast – as he acknowledges, all his contemporaries were no longer with us – but the history, the personalities, the ups and downs of the madeira economy was his great love; he had a huge library on the subject. He had been ferreting around old documents all his life. One really does get the feeling that there is little to add on the subject.

I read this book when it first came out, and have loved the wine before and since. But I have to confess that I had forgotten much that I should have remembered. That the four great grapes: Sercial, Verdelho, Bual and Malmsey, were all white, for instance. And at what altitude on this steep rocky island each was planted. What I do remember is the crucial importance of the south-eastern states of the USA – and the towns of Savannah and Charleston – had on the fortunes of the wine; that the appearance of oidium followed by the Civil War and then phylloxera very nearly destroyed the madeira market for good; and that just about everything – bottles, corks, cartons and all the vinification and bottling machinery – had to be imported from outside.

I much enjoyed re-reading Madeira, An Island Vineyard. I recommend it.