Madeira's EU-protected food and drink names

The complete list

These are all of them, in registration order. The file number is the reference the European Commission uses; it is what to quote if anybody disputes an entry.

That is eight*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026 in total, and the list is exhaustive for registered names containing the word Madeira as at 26 August 2026.

Two of the eight are drinks nobody expects

Poncha is not a folk recipe with a loose definition. Poncha da Madeira is a registered geographical indication for a spirit drink in the liqueur category, and it has been since 13 February 2008*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026. The name is legally protected, which means a bottle labelled Poncha da Madeira has to comply with a specification rather than merely be poured on the island.

Rum da Madeira is older still — registered 12 June 1989*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026, the earliest of the eight, and older than the wine registration. It is the base spirit of poncha, distilled from sugarcane, and it makes Madeira one of the few places in Europe with a protected rum of its own.

So the drink sold as the island’s informal souvenir and the spirit it is made from are both protected names, while the beef skewer that appears on every list of Madeiran food is not. The eating and drinking guide covers how both are actually made and served.

Four of the eight were registered in the last three years

This is why an old list is worse than no list. Half the register is recent:

• Sidra da Madeira, the cider, registered 23 August 2023*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026
• Requeijão da Madeira, the curd cheese, registered 15 November 2023*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026
• Cebola da Madeira, the onion, registered 28 November 2023*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026
• Batata-Doce da Madeira, the sweet potato, registered 5 July 2024*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026

Two of those matter more than they look. Requeijão is the curd cheese inside a queijada da Madeira, so the ingredient carries a protected name and the pastry made from it does not. And Batata-Doce da Madeira is the sweet potato that makes bolo do caco what it is: the bread is unprotected, its distinguishing ingredient is a PDO.

Madeiran cider is the genuinely under-covered one. It has held a protected name since 23 August 2023*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026 and barely appears in English-language food writing about the island at all.

Banana da Madeira: two sources, one contradiction

This is the entry that shows why the method matters, and it is the one place on this page where no answer is given.

visitmadeira.com, the Madeira Islands Tourism Board, states on its own Banana from Madeira page that the fruit holds Protected Geographical Indication status, ensuring its authenticity and international prestige.

The European Commission's eAmbrosia register, queried directly on 26 August 2026 for the term Banana, returned exactly one record: Banana dos Açores, PGI-PT-03414, with a status of Applied dated 3 April 2025. It returned no record for Banana da Madeira at any status, applied or registered. A separate query for the term Madeira returned the eight*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026 names in the table above, and Banana da Madeira was not among them. The Portuguese national traditional-products register lists Banana da Madeira without a DOP or IGP suffix, unlike its entry for Anona da Madeira DOP.

Those two sources conflict, and both are named here rather than one being quietly picked. The tourism board is the authority on the island's produce; the European Commission is the authority on European protected names. The register is the document that decides whether a name is protected, but the tourism board is not a random blog either, and the gap may reflect a national-level scheme, a lapsed application, or an error on one side.

What can be said without a conflict: Banana da Madeira is a distinct small dessert banana grown mainly on the island's south coast, and it is sold under that name in Portuguese supermarkets. Anything that turns this page into a flat claim of PGI status has misread it.

What is not protected, and the near-misses

Absent from the register, in every case checked: espetada, bolo do caco, bolo de mel, queijadas da Madeira, and Madeira passion fruit. None of them holds an EU protected name. Anyone anywhere can make and sell an espetada, and several places outside Madeira do.

Two Azorean names are close enough to cause trouble in an English sentence. Maracujá dos Açores / S. Miguel is a registered PDO, dating from 1996 — that is the Azores, a different archipelago about a thousand kilometres away, and Madeira passion fruit has no protected status at all. Banana dos Açores is an applied-for PGI, not a registered one, and not Madeiran.

Anona da Madeira remains the only Madeiran fruit with an EU Protected Designation of Origin, registered 6 June 2000*, source: European Commission, 2026, read August 26, 2026 and introduced to the island in the seventeenth century.

PDO, PGI, GI — what the register actually records

The register applies different labels to different product families, and the labels are not interchangeable.

PDO — Protected Designation of Origin, DOP in Portuguese — is the tighter category, and on the Madeira list it covers the wine, the custard apple, the onion and the sweet potato. PGI — Protected Geographical Indication, IGP, covers the cider and the curd cheese. Spirit drinks sit under their own heading and are recorded simply as geographical indications, which is how Rum da Madeira and Poncha da Madeira appear.

What the register does not do is grade quality. It records that a name belongs to a place and to a specification. Madeira wine's specification, for instance, sets the permitted grapes, the ageing methods, the alcohol band and the words allowed on the label, all of which are set out in the wine guide.

How this list was produced

eAmbrosia is not a page that can simply be fetched. It is a single-page application that renders nothing useful to an ordinary request. The list here was obtained by intercepting the requests the page itself makes and calling its own public filter endpoint directly, with the protected-name filter set first to Madeira and then to Banana.

That is worth recording for two reasons. First, it means the eight entries came from the Commission's database rather than from a secondary summary of it. Second, it explains why so much Madeira food writing gets protected status wrong: the authoritative source is genuinely awkward to read, so writers quote each other instead, and an error entered a decade ago is still circulating.

Anything asserting a protected status for a Madeiran food should be checkable against this list. If a name is not in the table above, the claim needs its own evidence.