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Bastardo is a dark-skinned wine grape which is grown in Portugal, France and possibly north-western Spain. It has also been planted under various names in Australia and California. It traditionally makes deeply colored, cherry-red wines which are high in alcohol and have flavors redolent of dark red berries and other forest fruits. In Portugal the variety's most famous incarnation is in the fortified Madeira Bastardo wine made on the volcanic archipelago of Madeira. Madeira Bastardo is a name seen on fewer and fewer bottles of Madeira wine each year, not because of the unfortunate name (although one might almost view this as a quirky marketing advantage to the modern, adventurous wine consumer) but because the Bastardo grape variety is nearly extinct on the island. Like Bual, Sercial and Terrantez, only a small acreage of Bastardo vines remain there, although there are sufficient vines remaining for a handful of producers to make tiny quantities of Bastardo Madeira each vintage. Although wines of reasonable quality can be produced from Bastardo vines, the yields are typically so low that it is vastly more profitable to plant reliably healthy croppers like Tinta Negra Mole and Verdelho. On the Portuguese mainland Bastardo is grown in the Douro, and slightly further south in the Dao and Bairrada regions. It is one of the many varieties permitted in the production of Port, although the quality of its grapes is insufficient to earn it a place among the five 'recommended' Port grape varieties. The variety also has also been recorded under the names Cabernet Gros and Malvoisie Noire in the South-West region of France, and it has been called both Gros Cabernet and Touriga in Australia. Antipodean winemakers now distinguish clearly between Bastardo and the 'real' Tourigas Touriga Nacional and Touriga Franca. Bastardo is also believed to be the same variety as the Trousseau which grows in France's Jura region. It is not yet clear whether the Bastardo grape of Galicia (otherwise known as Merenzao) is the same as Madeira's Bastardo. Despite its interesting name (whose meaning is the same as that of the Batard of Burgundy's Montrachet) the etymology of Bastardo remains unclear. Alternative names for this grape variety
Click on a listed Bastardo
wine
below for price and wine store information.
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