The seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries were marked by the emergence of a new culture that
would boost the Madeira economy again: wine. In the mid sixteenth century, the
famous English playwright William Shakespeare cites the important export and
notoriety of the Malvasia wine, drowning the Duke of Clarence, brother of King
Edward IV of England, in a barrel of this wine.
With the decline of sugar production in the late sixteenth century, sugar
plantations were replaced by vineyards, originating in the so-called ‘Wine
Culture’, which acquired international fame and provided the rise of a new
social class, the Bourgeoisie. With the increase of commercial treaties with
England, important English merchants settled on the Island and, ultimately,
controlled the increasingly important island wine trade. The English traders
settled in the Funchal as of the seventeenth century, consolidating the markets
from North America, the West Indies and England itself. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the structure of the “wine city prevailed over the sugar
city”.
The various governors of Madeira and even the convents of Funchal
eventually entered the wine trade.
