A glass of vintage Madeira is seen in the storage area of the Artur de Barros e Sousa wine company in Funchal, the capital of the Portuguese island of Madeira.Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
The question
I have a few rare port and Madeira wines that are 50 to 100 years old and I'm wondering about storage. I understand that dry red wines sealed with cork are supposed to lie on their side in a dark, cool room. But I've also heard that sweet wines like port and Madeira should be kept upright. Am I right? I may want to sell them because they're expensive but now I'm not sure if I've been storing them correctly.
The answer
You're correct about Madeira but wrong about port, or so the prevailing wisdom goes.
As a general rule, all wine sealed with cork should be stored on its side. The idea is to keep the closure moist and plump and thus better able to hold its seal. Such is the case with vintage port, the expensive, unfiltered style that always comes with a harvest date on the label. This is the port style specifically designed for cellaring at home. In fact, you may notice a white dab of paint at the base of some vintage-port bottles, usually below the front label, which reinforces my argument about horizontal storage. The so-called splash mark is there to let you know which way the bottle was stored in Portugal and en route to market in its wooden crate (namely, splash mark up). This way you'll know to store it in the same manner so that the unsightly, growing crust of sediment continues to collect on the same side of the bottle.
You might note that vintage ports also tend to come with full-size, freestanding corks, just like those found on regular wine bottles. These closures stand in contrast to the shorter, T-shaped cork-and-plastic-cap stoppers that tend to be found on early-drinking port styles (such as ruby and late-bottled vintage, or LBV) as well as on spirits and liqueurs, which are always kept upright.
Madeira, which comes from the Portuguese island of the same name, represents an exception in the wine world. It's fortified, like port, but its characteristic nutty tang and bruised-fruit flavour comes from a process of intentional heating and oxidation. To use a pejorative description, it is prespoiled wine, though in this case the spoiling has been carried out carefully in such a way as to yield an appealing flavour. This is why Madeira enjoys the greatest longevity of any wine style; it doesn't get stale because it starts out stale (in a manner of speaking). I've had a bottle from the early 1800s that was terrific – probably as "fresh" as the day it was bottled.
The upshot is that a bit of extra oxygen exposure from a potentially dried-out cork presents no big issue for hardy Madeira. Some people believe it even helps maintain the wine's unusual flavour. Rather, contact with cork presents a bigger risk because cork comes with its own set of potential problems. It can, for example, be polluted by a randomly occurring substance known as TCA, which is responsible for cork taint, or by mould that feeds on cork's fibres in high-humidity conditions.
Just be careful when extracting a dried-out Madeira cork from a bottle that has not been sealed with wax. And prepare for a few crumbles ending up in your wine, which is why, even if you're not a coffee drinker, you need coffee filters.
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