Wines of the Past, and the future. Of the hundreds of families who have produced and shipped Madeira over the past two centuries, only four remain: Blandy, Borges, D’Oliveira and Barbeito. The first three families have been around since the nineteenth century, and their legacy secured by having stockpiled old vintages during and after the Phylloxera epidemic of the the 1870s.

Vinhos Barbeito, however, is one of the youngest families, founding their company in 1946, a particularly dark era for Madeira due to World War II. As many houses were shuttering, Mario Barbeito, former accountant for Borges, saw opportunity, and began buying substantial stocks of old vintages from important families. He was stockpiling these wines for his future generations, namely daughter Manuela, who took over the business in the 1970s, and her son Ricardo Diogo Freitas, responsible for the forward-thinking, quality-focused direction the winery took in the early 1990s. Ricardo's aim was always authentic Madeira, offering only 100% canteiro wines (the traditional method of gently warming wines in stacked barrels, with no artificial heating in tanks), with additional aging periods, and no added caramel or deacidification. They also became the first Madeira producer to switch all production to bottled wines, in 1993.

View wines currently available in LCBO stores here.