While foraging around in the cellar looking for some wine to pour with the ham and cheese omelet I was planning to whip up for dinner, I happened to notice that a bottle of Madeira, Miles Ten Year-Old Malmsey, was leaking slightly. Not sure what to do about this, I brought it 
upstairs along with the two bottles of red and set it on the counter to be dealt with at a later date. Meanwhile, I started to work on the omelet, sautéing chopped ham, onions and garlic, plus a diced tomato, in olive oil and butter. When it was all cooked down to a slightly caramelized jumble of goodness, the eggs went into the sizzling skillet. I lowered the heat, uncorked one of the bottles of red wine and drizzled some into a glass. Yuck! The noxious musty perfume of corked wine assaulted my olfactory senses.
I rinsed the glass and tested the next wine, but amazingly, this aroma was equally unpleasant except that I was now smelling nail polish remover rather than cork taint. This wine was suffering from a bad case of ethyl acetate spoilage, a microbial flaw that can result from certain yeasts. So now I was facing a gastronomic emergency consisting of two unpalatable wines plus an omelet that was within seconds of needing to be consumed! With no time to head back to the cellar I quickly opened the Madeira and poured out a glassful, hoping the unorthodox match wouldn’t be too ghastly.
Not only was the improvised pairing not ghastly, it was utterly delicious. With its velvety texture and nutty flavors the Madeira was an unusual but charmingly felicitous match for the omelet, picking up and emphasizing the omelet’s buttery-eggy-cheesy richness, and juxtaposing the salty/meatiness of the ham with layers of fruit as dense and complex as chutney. But am I the only person to have blundered into the extraordinary discovery that Madeira can pair deliciously with savory food?
Of course I’m not. For eons, cooks have spiked savory dishes such as soup with Madeira. Julia Child wrote in her “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” that it is “often the final flavor-
fillip for sauces,” and James Beard baked pureed parsnips with Madeira. But today’s visionary chefs are not content to simply cook with it, they are actually creating savory dishes to partner with Madeira rather than more traditional wines. One of these chefs is George Mendes, who demonstrated some of the pairings he’s come up with at a special dinner he hosted at his Manhattan restaurant, Aldea. I wish I’d been there to sample delicacies such as clams with olive oil and cilantro paired with Blandy’s 5 year old Sercial, and smoky country ham with Broadbent Boal 10 year old, but just reading about them inspires me to conjure up something a little more exotic than eggs next time I encounter a leaky bottle of Madeira in my cellar.
Which brings me to the topic of what one ought to do in such a situation: Ignore it, wipe the bottle off and hope it stops leaking–or what? I put the question to a couple of experts, and here’s what I’ve learned. Bartholomew Broadbent, the Madeira savant and wine importer (Broadbent Selections) told me “Madeira is the only wine in the cellar which is not supposed to be lying down.” It doesn’t matter if the cork dries up or even falls into the bottle, he added. “Since the wine is already oxidized, no harm can come to it.” Then, with a wicked grin, he asked if I’d drunk the whole bottle that evening once I’d opened it. “You need not have bothered finishing it yourself,” he said. “You could have kept it open for many years, using something to keep the dust out of it.” (For the record, I did not drink the entire bottle that night.)
Another Madeira importer, Mannie Berk (The Rare Wine Co.), concurs: “Exposure to air has little effect on Madeira. It’s the only wine that has little to fear from a leaking cork”. He also assures me that once the bottle is open there’s no hurry to drink it. “Just leave it alone and drink when the mood strikes.”
As a matter of fact I think the mood is about to strike, so I’ll leave you with one last reminder from Bartholomew Broadbent: “If you have leaky bottles of Madeira in your cellar simply stand them up–and learn that they wouldn’t have become leaky if they’d been stored upright in the first place!”
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