Bart Broadbent, living in San Francisco has become a world expert at finding the finest, sometimes overlooked, fortified and still wines. His father, Michael, literally wrote the book, so to speak, on wine, based on his decades of tasting thousands of exquisitely rare wines brought to auction over many decades at Christies in London. The Broadbent Madeira Bual 1964 offers aromas of rich oil infused with toasted hazelnuts. A swallow is packed with a number of citrus flavors, wrapped with tart, perhaps mildly bitter elements. Bart Broadbent suggests pairing this wine with fois gras.
People are sometimes surprised at the idea of serving a sweeter wine with dinner.
A sweet wine, balanced with high acidity dances with the opulent richness of liver derived delicacies. The best Madeiras are aged for years in wooden casks positioned in sun-baked attics. Sometimes heat from the processed cooking of cheaper wines below adds to the heat. Fortified and complex, concentrated wines are ultimately blended. The good news is that all of this exposure to heat means that the wine in your open bottle is unlikely to suffer from contact with air.