It was November 1971, on La Palma, in the Canary Islands. Carlos Lozano, like everyone else on the island, had been feeling tremors for a month—small explosions, sounds coming from under the earth.
“I remember it was a Saturday. We were all watching television, sitting on the couch. And suddenly, an explosion moved us from one side of the room to the other. It was tremendous,” Lozano says, recalling the eruption of the Teneguía volcano.
Lozano is the winemaker at Bodegas Teneguía, a cooperative with 189 members that has been producing wines since 1945. The winery—where we are standing right now—is just a few miles from the volcano in Fuencalientes.
The black ash from Teneguía is scattered everywhere on the island’s southwestern coast. Lozano tells me that, if you are close enough, you can still feel the warmth of the earth and smell the sulfur emanating from the volcano’s depths. The ash added several square miles of land to La Palma—deserted miles, black land extending in all directions from the volcano. Beyond that, the Atlantic Ocean fills the entire horizon.
The Canary Islands, located off the coast of northwest Africa, are young in geological terms: Volcanoes began to form the islands about 30 million years ago. More recently, by the early 16th century, the Canaries became a mandatory stop for ships bound for the New World. Christopher Columbus stocked up here before heading across the Atlantic. Since then the islands have been a meeting point of cultures, providing an opportunity for cultural exchange as well as trade.
The local wines are part of the legacy of this exchange, made with grapes rarely found anywhere else. Perhaps because these islands are far from the commercial centers of the wine world, this heritage has remained intact. And today a number of producers have begun to explore the island’s forgotten varieties and ancient vines, presenting Canary Island wines with a clarity that we have never seen before.
“To plant malvasía at Los Llanos Negros you have to dig deep—sometimes up to twelve feet to find fertile soil.”
—Carlos Lozano
In the past, the Canary Islands had been best known for sweet malvasía, and that remains a focus for Lozano at Teneguía. He took me to Los Llanos Negros, the vineyard he considers his grand cru for malvasía, a site that developed out of another volcanic eruption, in 1678, which covered much of the south of the island with ash. Lozano explains that the ash helps to hold moisture, but it’s not fertile soil. “To plant malvasía here,” he says, “you have to dig deep, sometimes up to twelve feet to find more fertile soil.”
Malvasía, being a very late-ripening grape, benefits from the low altitude of the site, the southern exposure and the reflection of the sun off the sea: The warmth allows the grapes to ripen relatively early, while they still maintain acidity—key for producing sweet wines with balance. Growers can sell a kilo of sweet malvasía grapes for five euros, which would appear to be a good return if the work in the vineyard were not so demanding. As it’s a very dry place (it rains about 300 millimeters per year), botrytis is rare, but growers often make five successive passes to harvest the grapes as malvasía tends to ripen unevenly. The goal is a naturally sweet wine like Teneguía’s 2008 Malvasía Reserva, a delicious nectar with the flavor of fresh apricots. Meanwhile, if the grapes only ripen enough to make a dry wine, Lozano says, you get paid less than half as much.
To make a living in wine, many new producers are looking beyond malvasía to a wealth of other vines. When I left Bodegas Teneguía in Fuencalientes, I had to drive only a few blocks to arrive at Matías i Torres. The small winery is run by Victoria Torres, the fifth generation of her family to make wine here and the first to consider wine as a career. Her father and grandfather—like many others in the area—made their living by growing bananas or as grocers. They worked the vineyard only as a family tradition, to sustain their heritage. “Now the average age of vineyard owners is sixty years—and seventy percent of the vineyards are abandoned,” Torres says.
In the cellar, Torres has some very old wooden barrels—the local term is “bocois”—and an old wooden press made with tea wood, a tree native to La Palma. She produces single-varietal wines with local grapes like negramoll, listán blanco and vijariego as well as malvasía. All these varieties, plus another 50, by her calculations, reached the islands with European sailors in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Many of the varieties have disappeared from their original homes and persist only on these remote islands where phylloxera has yet to arrive.
Like Lozano, Torres makes subtle, delicate malvasías from Los Llanos Negros. She also farms vines in Las Machuqueras, on the black soils that lead up to the Teneguía volcano, where vintners have built small stone walls to protect the plants from the strong winds. This is where Torres grows her Listán Blanco 2013, a white with an enormous depth of flavor, with floral scents and ripe white fruit, the intense structure feeling like fine needles of acidity. Commenting on the barren landscape, Torres says, “When tourists visit these vineyards, they think we treat the vines with herbicides, but the truth is, with this ground and the wind, nothing grows here but the vines.”
“When tourists visit these vineyards, they think we treat the vines with herbicides, but the truth is, with this ground and wind, nothing grows here but the vines.”
—Victoria Torres
Constancio Ballesteros farms vines on equally challenging ground, on the north side of the island, for Vinos Tendal. In the heights of Tijarafe, rising upwards of 5,000 feet, the scenery is breathtaking. The entire length of the island opens up to the south, small hillocks of land intertwining with one another, sometimes interrupted by thick pine forests before they fall off into the sea.
Ballesteros and his wife, Nancy, met while studying enology in La Mancha. In 1997 they decided to settle on La Palma, where Nancy was born. “We didn’t want to fill tanks with millions of liters of wine. Here it’s quite the opposite,” says Ballesteros.
Ballesteros farms in La Palma’s oldest soils, created by an older eruption than the one that created the soils at Llanos Negros. Some of the soil is rocky, some clay, the volcanic ash having eroded or blown away. As we stand looking out over the Atlantic, the wind is bitterly cold and intense. Goats graze on the grasses growing around the pine, almond and fig trees that dot the landscape; their milk produces some of the island’s most fragrant and delicious cheeses. Far from the moderating influence of the sea, summers here are hell and in winter it’s severely cold. And the wind never stops blowing. Down near the sea, gardens grow one of the most delicious varieties of potato in the world, and equally great tomatoes, but there are none of those up here.
When the couple moved to La Palma, they started to buy small plots in Tijarafe, especially old-vine listán prieto, which today represents about 60 percent of the red wines they produce at Tendal. “Listán prieto is the only variety that can grow in these conditions,” Ballesteros says. “If you look at the vineyards, the farther north you go, the greater the altitude and the more listán prieto is planted. It holds water well; it never rots; it is rustic. While in summer, the wind from the Sahara can burn everything else, the prieto holds on, no problem.”
“We didn’t want to fill tanks with millions of liters of wine. Here, it’s quite the opposite.”
—Constancio Ballesteros
Listán prieto may be the same as the mission grape of California, the país of Chile and the criolla in Argentina, but Ballesteros is not certain. “The village elders call it prieto picudo,” he says, “a grape from León [in Spain].” However, when we head to the tasting room, just below his house by the sea, we taste his 2014 Tradición Listán Prieto and, varietally, it is an exact copy of a país from Cauquenes, in Chile’s Maule Valley: its earthy aromas, notes of red fruit and flowers, and its rustic texture. If we had a genetic laboratory close by, I’m sure we could have proved the relationship.
Of course there is neither a laboratory nor are there any high-tech devices here at Tendal. To produce Tradición, Ballesteros leaves the grapes in an open concrete lagar, where he foot-treads the grapes and drains off the juice to let it ferment in tank without any sulfur or added yeasts. He bottles the wine without any time in oak, hoping to capture the pure expression of the place. It’s full of character and yet it’s a red that’s easy to drink.
The inhabitants of La Palma seem to like it as much as I do. About 80 percent of Tendal’s annual 8,333-case production sells on the island. The locals like these flavors, according to Ballesteros; they like the taste of the wines born in their own land.
Of the 12 million tourists who visit the Canaries every year, only one million head to La Palma. Most go to Tenerife, the largest of the islands, where trade winds chase the clouds away from the south end of the island and the weather is sunny. Instead of vineyards, this has become a land of hotels, filled throughout the year by tourists from northern Europe hoping to overcome their pallor.
Vineyards are more plentiful on the north end of Tenerife, where Roberto Santana and three friends from university established Envinate in 2005. They consult for a number of wineries and produce their own wines from old vines in Tenerife, and in Ribera Sacra, Galicia. Envinate is based in Taganana, the extreme northeast corner of the island, a remote place, surrounded by steep mountains and jagged peaks, cliffs plunging into the ocean and small green plots of vines that grow among the rocks. Traveling to Taganana is a challenge, so the community has remained a small, closed society. “It took almost two years for the people to talk with us,” Santana says. “They didn’t want to have anything to do with us.”
Finally, Santana’s father-in-law put them in touch with one of the producers in the area. “We went to his house by the beach, and after a few cold beers we told him that we wanted to protect the vineyards, working them with respect. And we convinced him. And we shook hands, which in these parts of Spain is like signing a contract for life.”
Now they work with about 15 producers in the area. “Our choice here was to vinify plots rather than varieties,” Santana says. “Varietal wine really was not an option because the plots, all very old vines, are mixed. And generally, the predominant variety accounts for no more than twenty or thirty percent of the vines.” Their first single-parcel wines came from Amogoje and Margalagua, a white and a red from two tiny plots spread among the volcanic rocks in the area, both directly facing the Atlantic.
Amogoje is a mixture of albillo criollo, torrontés, malvasia, marmajuelo, gual, “and other grapes, but we do not know what they are,” says Santana. It’s a saline, nutty wine, rich in white fruit notes, generous in marine flavor.
Margalagua is based on listán negro, with vijariego, malvasía negra, negramoll, baboso and other native varieties. It has deep background notes of ash, surrounded by radiant red fruit and refreshing acidity.
Around the same time Envinate started to work with Tenerife’s vineyards, Santana met Jonatan García Lima and his father, Francisco, owner of Suertes del Marqués.
The García family has been in the Oratava Valley, just south of Taganana, for 300 years. Jonatan García runs the winery, while his father handles the family’s furniture-making business. Jonatan’s grandparents traded in wine, and the García family became interested in producing their own wine some 27 years ago when they bought vineyards in Suertes del Marqués, at the foot of the Teide volcano, whose summit rises above 12,000 feet; it last erupted more than two centuries ago.
“Our wealth is in the real Jurassic Park varieties we have here in Tenerife.”
—Jonatan García
Of their annual production of 7,500 cases, sixty percent comes from fruit they purchase from local growers—“ village wines” as García calls them. They use their own 22 acres of vines for single-vineyard wines.
The foothills of Teide face the sea in a gentle slope that descends from 2,600 to 800 feet. The old vines in the area caught Santana’s attention, including El Ciruelo, a 100-year-old vineyard surrounding a twisted plum tree on volcanic, chalky soils. At the time, García and his father were looking to change the focus of the winery, from technical wines to an emphasis on the vineyards. So when Santana expressed interest in El Ciruelo, the Garcías decided not to heed their neighbor’s advice to rip out the old vines and plant petit verdot, syrah or cabernet sauvignon—as that was what you could sell—and brought Santana on to focus on farming by plot, working conscientiously in the vineyards. “Our wealth is in the real Jurassic Park varieties we have here in Tenerife,” García says.
“Our choice was to vinify plots rather than varieties. Varietal wine really was not an option because the plots, all very old vines, are mixed.”
—Roberto Santana
El Ciruelo is a mixed planting that emphasizes listán negro over listán blanco. Santana harvested those grapes early in the season, to retain freshness, and fermented the wine in cement tanks without any additions. He aged it for a year in old barrels, where it developed into an intensely mineral red with aromas of charcoal and ash, notes of currant and black cherry and a nervous tannic structure.
Since the Envinate team started to work in Tenerife, they have developed a network of contacts and friendships with other producers. In fact, there’s a growing community of winemakers who share a similar goal, seeking the expression of the place through the mosaic of grapes that the island offers. Santana takes me across the island to the northwest of Tenerife to meet his friend Borja Perez.
Perez founded Ignios Orígenes in 2011, leasing vineyard land in the D.O. Ycoden-Daute-Isora. Most of his plots are recently planted, a result of a conversion of vineyards driven by the local government since 1999, in which old abandoned vineyards have been uprooted and replanted with the same native varieties. Perez works with small plots of marmajuelo, baboso negro, malvasía and tintilla. His most recent planting is vijariego, growing at an elevation of 2,300 feet in the shadow of the Teide volcano.
The 2013 vintage is the first release of Ignios Vijariego, a red with fiercely fresh fruit flavors and wild tannins. Few people outside of these Atlantic islands might recognize vijariego as a variety, but a lot of wine drinkers are beginning to appreciate the kind of freshness and tension a wine like this offers. It’s a different structure and a different set of flavors than any Spanish wine you might have tasted before. These wines have little to do with the contemporary northern European tourists packing into the south side of Tenerife. They are, perhaps, more about the tastes of earlier European adventurers, and the vines they transported to these islands on their journeys west to the New World.
is the author of Descorchados, an annual guide to the wines of South America, and covers Chile for W&S.
This story appears in the print issue
of August 2015.
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