Tasting Blandy’s 3 years old Full Sweet Madeira wine: “Duke of Clarence”

It’s just economics!

The simple economics says that when you produce two wines, one of which sells for well over €100 and another for around €9, you will do your best to make the cheap wines as inexpensively as possible.

To accomplish this, you will likely use the most abound grapes and employ the cheapest method to make these wines. If you are a winemaker in Madeira, that grape is Tinta Negra, and the production method is Estufagem.

Blandy’s “Duke” wines: the 3 years old Madeira wines with noble names

There are a total of 8 fortified winemakers on Madeira Island. All of them produce 3 years old blended wines. The way they call their wines is fairly identical. Irrespective of whether the wine was produced by D’Oliveiras or Henriques & Henriques, expect to see the name of the winemaker followed by the sweetness level and suffixed by “3 years” on the wine label.

Needless to say, if you make your basic wines using pretty much identical grapes that everybody else does, use the same production method that everybody else uses, and name your wines pretty much the same way, you are bound to end up with a fairly indistinguishable product. It gets mighty boring pretty fast.

Now imagine if you have countless bottles of such wine lined up on supermarket shelves thousands of miles away. Making buyers unfamiliar with your brand pick your wine vs. the wine of your competitor becomes a challenge. But what if you name your wines in such a way that they are immediately placed in a familiar context for the prospective buyers? That’s a game-changer.

Like all other Madeiran winemakers, Blandy’s produces 3 years old blended wines of four different sweetness levels. Just like everybody else, Blandy’s make all these wines 100% of Tinta Negra grapes. And just like everybody else, they age these wines using the Estufagem method. But unlike other winemakers, Blandy’s did not put “3 years” old on the labels of their 3 years old blended wines. Instead, they gave their basic blends the names of the widely known dukes. There’s Dry “Duke of Sussex”, Medium-Sweet “Duke of Cumberland” and the pièce de résistance of all 3 years old blended wines, Sweet “Duke of Clarence”.

Blandy’s Sweet Madeira “Duke of Clarence”: wine tasting notes

Awarded Bronze by Decanter magazine in 2021, Duke of Clarence is reportedly the most widely sold Madeira in the UK, especially around Christmas. A stock check of the Madeira aisle at our provincial liquor stores suggests this to be likely true for Canada. So, how does this wine taste?

Like all blended Madeira wines, this one is a non-vintage wine. Do not mistake “years old” for the vintage age. It is not an indication of how long the entire content of the bottle was aged either. 3 years old blended wines may have only a certain percentage of the wine aged for 3 years.

Unlike still wines, Madeira fortified wines do not degrade in quality once you pop the cork. You can keep a bottle of Madeira wine open for at least 6 months. It is not uncommon to hear that Madeira wine tastes well even a year after getting opened.

There’s no need to store a bottle of Duke of Clarence in the fridge after opening. The bottle must have a tight-fitting cork and needs to be kept at low light and constant temperature. We had a bottle of our “Duke” open for four months. We did not observe much if any, loss of its flavor profile.

If you have a bottle of this wine in your cellar, you can drink it now or whenever you wish. As one of the wine writers once remarked, it is virtually indestructible once bottled. Make sure you store your Madeira bottles vertically, never horizontally. Storing Madeira horizontally may lead to cork degradation and spoilage of wine.

Blandy’s Sweet Madeira “Duke of Clarence”: food pairing recommendations

Like all full sweet fortified Madeira wines, Duke of Clarence is primarily considered an aperitif. However, it does pair well with several cheeses and dessert dishes. These are some of the tested food pairings that work well with this wine:

Cheeses that work well with this wine are:

• Blueberries-covered sweetened goat cheese.
• Aged English Cheddar
• Gouda truffle cheese
• Alisios, mixed milk cheese from the Spanish island of Fuerteventura. This is a hard cheese covered with sweet paprika.
• Prugne St Nectaire, a semi-soft cheese from France.

Deserts that work well are:

• Chocolate-covered strawberries, orange segments, and walnut pieces as described in our sweet charcuterie board .
• Raspberry and white chocolate chip coffee cake.
• Galette des Rois
• Chocolate truffles, especially coffee-flavoured chocolate truffles.
• Chocolate with almond nougat.
• Soft nougat, especially with raspberries and dark chocolate.

We also put together a crostini board specifically for this wine .

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Bottom line

All wineries pride themselves on the uniqueness of their products. However, in our opinion, 3 years old blends produced by the top-tier Madeira wineries share more similarities than most of these winemakers are keen to admit.

Of course, the skills of the winemakers will confer some distinctive aroma profiles on these wines. But let’s not forget, 3 years old blended wines are entry-level, very inexpensive Madeira. Spending winemaker’s time on making them unique and special is simply not economically feasible.

While we cannot with confidence attribute the naming of the Blandy’s 3 years old blended Madeira wines to marketing shenanigans, we can with certainty say that it was an ingenious differentiation strategy.

And that’s a wrap!