More Tourism and Some Dramas

Well, we have been here in Machico for nearly a week now. We have managed to do some stuff including another trip to Funchal where we visited a madeira wine lodge – Blandy's is perhaps one of the largest and oldest. We also treated ourselves to an excellent lunch there and finally managed a quick look round the famous Mercardo de Lavradores. The Mercado was a bit of a disappointment and we made snobby comments to ourselves about what Borough Market is like in London! We should probably have gone there in the morning though as all the fish stalls were closed.

The Wine Armazem as they are called here was very good though. The talk was quite lively and included a reasonable amount of information on the history of Madeira wine and how it is made. For those who are oenological nerds like me, the chief interest is the apparently terrible way they treat the wine. As ever, this goes back into the history of the wine.

Ships used to take on the wine as ballast and to protect it they fortified the wine. However, the conditions on the ship were frankly dreadful with constant motion to disturb the wine and constant heating and cooling of the wine as the ships sailed to the tropics and back. The result was of course that a percentage of the wine was lost to evaporation but that it gained the distinctive flavour that they work hard to create today. Essentially, they do this by storing the casks in the lofts of their buildings rather than in the cellar. There the humid air and the sun on the roof keep heating and cooling the wine and so it seems to go to the tropics and back.

The wine has had it's ups and downs of course. The wine faces stiff competition from both Porto and Jerez. Then, in recent times there was a rush to make as much wine as possible with no view to the quality all of which adversely affected the market for Madeira. I can't help thinking that the Flanders and Swan song “Have Some Madeira M'Dear” may also have affected the UK market a bit. Thankfully, the major producers are now attempting to address the quality issue and insisting on only using the local grape variety specified rather than blending it with other, easier to grow grape varieties.

The taste experience was of course great. It is a difficult wine to describe and we only got to try a medium and sweet version. It is quite a lot stronger than either Porto or sherry and doesn't have the musty taste that even sweet sherries gain from the Pedro Jimenez grape or the supple smoothness of Porto. There is lots of alcohol in it though and the sweek fruitiness of the Malvasia grape made the sweet on very nice. Needless to say, we treated ourselves to a bottle and, me being me, I had to go for one of their single vintage bottles which we will use to celebrate the end of the cruise.

On other fronts, we have found that there must be a bit of an electrical short as the batteries are not holding their charge properly. This has been masked for quite a while because the wind generator has been keeping up. We then managed to thoroughly confuse ourselves with measuring the resistance across various parts of the electrical system. With the battery switch set to the domestic bank we see less than full resistance with all the circuit breakers open. Thus, there seems to be a leak somewhere but we can't isolate it. None of the circuits on the switch panel seem to be problematical but there is not much wiring and it all looks very professional and secure between the batteries, the main battery selector switch and the switch panel. Oh well, we will have to see and at least the wind is now back up which means that Henry the Navigator can stay on top of it all.

Still, our problems pale into insignificance to those of poor Eva on Olina of Eva7Seas fame. Her engine is effectively knackered. At some point the head gasket blew and water is in the oil and has been for some time now. The Volvo agents here have promised to rebuild it for her in their break times but have so far run in to all sorts of problems getting it out of the boat. I helped to see about disconnecting the prop shaft but it is apparently totally seized to the gearbox flange. I really don't think that they will be able to rebuild it and she needs to think in terms of a replacement. They might have a reconditioned 10hp engine which is much newer than what she has but we need to see it first really. And so the saga continues.

We are hoping to start heading to the Canaries ourselves around the weekend but feel we ought to put into a marina for a night or two so as to put the mains charger on the batteries first to ensure they are really in tip top charge. It would also be good to get a hot shower rather than just using the beach shower here.