Henriques and Henriques Single Harvest Boal 2000 Madeira

Location: Portugal, Madeira

Winemaker: Humberto Jardim

Grapes: Boal

Soil: mixed volcanic

Winemaking: fermentation with some fruit left whole-cluste with gentle skin maceration in stainless steel with native yeasts, fortified with natural grape spirit. Aged in canteiro for 15 years, bottled in 2016

From the Importer Haus Alpenz: The Single Harvest 2000 is a colheita bottling: an early-bottled vintage wine. (H&H prefer to use the term “Single Harvest,” a rough translation of “Colheita.”) Atypical for the house, this is reserved and surprisingly understated, imbued with detail and quiet confidence. Clove, cherry, brown sugar and rancio notes beckon from the glass. In the mouth, it’s supple and focused, a rich caress of pixilated Boal flavors enjoined to a long and refined finish.

João Joaquim Gonçalves Henriques founded the firm in 1850 as a partidista, supplying wine to other merchants from extensive Henriques vineyard holdings while continuing to amass significant stocks of old wines in the family cellars. In 1925, Henriques & Henriques began to bottle and export Madeira produced entirely from their own vineyards—an anomaly amongst producers on the island. Today, Henriques & Henriques is led by CEO and winemaker Humberto Jardim, one of Madeira’s great visionaries and ambassadors. The firm continues to source some of its needs from its own vineyards, most notably from a terraced, 10-hectare vineyard at Quinta Grande—the single largest on island, replanted in 1995.