Question about 1792 Madeira

You might try

A serious page from a private German collector, including by far the most extensive list of vintages and producers (click "Vintage List").

Depending on where you're based, you might also look at Roy Hersh's homepage

Roy (based in the US) being a regular at Robert Parker's forum and extremely knowledgeable about Port and Madeira. Probably you can contact him through his website.

HTH a little,

M.

In this case, a Solera 1792 likely would be far less expensive than vintage 1792. A solera wine is a blend of many years, and there could be only a few drops of vintage 1792 in a solera 1792. However, the mere mention of 1792 likely would make the wine more expensive than other equally good or better wines of like age, since it rides on the coattails of the very famous vintage 1792.

For true vintage Madeira, Michael Broadbent rates the general quality of 1792 as only 4 out of 5 star, while he rates the 1793, 1795, and

1798 as 5 star, What makes 1792 famous is that Napoleon picked up a pipe of 1792 in Madeira on his way to exile on St. Helena, but the Madeira was not opened. Since the Madeira had not been paid for, it was returned to Madeira on the death of Napoleon. This Madeira was bottled by Blandy. Since this Napoleon 1792 Madeira was only one pipe, there was likely much more 1792 Madeira bottled by others, and no doubt the true Napoleon 1792 caused a price increase for the other 1792 over the years. Michael Broadbent tasted the true Napoleon 1792 Madeira at the Madeira Wine Association (includes Blandy) wine library in 1983 and rated it 3 out of 5 stars. He found the wine had dried out quite a bit, but it still was very drinkable. Broadbent also notes that 2 bottles with remains of the original 1840 labels were still in a Houston cellar when Broadbent took stock of it in 2000.

The owner of the bottle of the 1792 solera Madeira should contact a major wine auction house for their evaluation of what this wine might bring at auction. You need to give all information found on the bottle, and any information you have about the history of the wine. The fill level and any evidence of leaking also would be very important.

What is a pipe?

A unit of measure equivalent to somewhere around 700 bottles. I'm sure somebody else can give more specifics and history.

- Chris

"Port wine was aged in barrels called "pipes" (a vertical container that holds about 700 bottles of wine). It subsequently became traditional for certain English families to "lay down a pipe of port" when a son was born. This meant that said amount would be held somewhere along the Thames; and when the young lad reached the age of consent, he would celebrate by opening and drinking the first bottle of 21 year old port wine. Of course it also meant that for the remainder of his life, he would be able to celebrate birthdays and other festivals with a wine that was of exactly the same vintage as he."

A family friend was born in 1935. His godfather laid him down a Pipe of 1935 Vintage port. He drank the last bottle on his 50th birthday - not having drunk all the others but having traded them over the years and in the process having built up a wonderful collection of mind boggling wines!

BTW referring to a concurrent thread..... in his cellar are various Maderias from the 18/19tth century rescued from his grandmothers cellar when she died - they have been in the family since bottling!

pk

Sorry about giving the same reference that was previously posted. However I do want to make the point that a Blandy 1792 solera including some wine from the Napoleon pipe is likely to be more valuable than a

1792 solera from some other company that does not. Again, your best source for the value of the wine is a major wine auction house that has international buyers. Some of the major UK auction houses also run auctions in other countries, including the US.

Alex Lidell devotes four full pages of his book "Madeira" (faber and faber, London 1998, 297 pp.) to "The 1792 Vintage and the Napoleon Madeira" (p. 246 to 249) where he states that the story about Napoleon receiving a cask of Madeira coming back later from St. Helena and bottled by Blandy's in 1840 most probably is a legend. The same holds true for the story that a part of this Napoleonic pipe was used to start a solera.

Nevertheless, he does not doubt the authenticity of the wine, he simply believes (and states why with good arguments) that there's no connection with Napoleon.

Thus said, both the 1792 vintage and the vintage solera command premiums because of the nice Napoleonic story.

Wolfgang Reutter says - according to fill and bottle condition - a price between 500 and 800 euros would be correct for the solera.

M.

Christie's had a bottle of Blandy's 1792 for sale in New York in December 2004. You may view the catalog at

. This is an extremely long PDF page, so scroll down to lot 455. The wine is a Blandy 1792 that was bottled in 1840 and was rebottled in 1960. It had been sold many years ago by Christie's in London. The price estimate, in $US is given. The description does not mention solera. I do recall speculation by someone, many years ago - likely Michael Broadbent - that some of the very old Madeira with a date might really be a solera rather than a single vintage wine.

Then we must also remember that wine laws were not always the same as today, and the laws were not always obeyed in some countries. Thus you could find sparkling Montrachet on some old restaurant wine lists in the US. Heaven knows how much "Napoleon" Cognac 1811 from the best regions of Cognac was shipped to the US before WWII. If this were all as stated on the labels, the production in 1811 in the better areas of Cognac must have been many, many times greater than today. Until fairly recently, a bottle or two of "Napoleon 1811" often was offered at some US auctions.

Both the 1792 vintage and the 1792 solera are known and quite well-documented.

M.

I found the comments by Michael Broadbent "A true vintage madeira is a wine from a cask, made from a named grape and bottled directly, or after a spell in demijohns, from the original cask. A solera is bottled from a cask that has been topped up and refreshed by wine of the same grape and quality but of younger vintages, the date of the bottle being the year of the original vintage of that blend. In practice , however, the dividing line is not quite as clear cut. A cask of vintage Madeira may have been refreshed - hard to tell. Labels are not always explicit: a date on its own might imply either vintage or solera."

"I think I ougtht to mention at this stage that many bottles of old madeira found in the cellars of country houses are rarely of the quality of true vintage and old solera wines that emanate from the island itself. I well remember coming across an enormous stock , all about a century old and all (after random sampling) thin and acetic, dead and gone."

The quote just above indicates that it may be very important to know who bottled the wine, especially since wines in the past were very often shipped in cask to several countries, where they were bottled when the buyer thought they were ready. Of course there may have been a few buyers of the wine who "improved" the wine.

In this book, Broadbent gives tasting notes for Blandy Solera Malmsey

1792. He tasted it in 1980 in the US. He rather liked it and rated it 4 out of 5-star.

Thank you very much.

M.

I believe this is from a batch that was bottled in the 1950's for some royal event (can't remember what the label said).

It is very probable, knowing my husband's family, that it is authentic...they did that sort of thing. (We also found a Rembrandt etching, and some original unpublished Robert Frost poems inscribed in autographed books). And that it's been sitting in that basement for 10 years after sitting in a wine cellar at the old family mansion for a lot longer.

1792 Extra Reserve Solera Madeira Bottle No. 944 of 1228. (This famous old Solera was laid down in 1792, and matured in its original casks. In 1957, the year of the state visit of Her Majesty QUEEN ELIZABETH II and the DUKE OF EDINBURGH to Portugal, the remainder of this wine was drawn from the casks and bottled, then rebottled and recorked 1980)

Only ours is 1119 out of 1228. And I don't know if it was rebottled and recorked in 1980, but well could have been.

That matches perfectly with what Alex Lidell writes in his book.

M.