Bodegas Viñátigo

Bodegas Viñátigo was founded by Juan Jesús Díaz at Icod de los Vinos on the north side of Tenerife, and has spent three decades on a single project: recovering the Canary Islands' own grape varieties before they disappeared.

The islands are viticulturally extraordinary. Phylloxera never reached them, so the vines are ungrafted and growing on their own roots, and several varieties survive here that were wiped out on the European mainland in the nineteenth century. The soils are black volcanic ash and lapilli, and vines are trained in ways found nowhere else, including the braided cordon trenzado of the Orotava valley, where canes are plaited into ropes several metres long.

Díaz has propagated and bottled varieties that had fallen to a few surviving plants: Marmajuelo, Gual, Vijariego, Baboso. Canary wine was shipped across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and praised by Shakespeare as Canary sack, then vanished from view for three hundred years. This is a large part of why it is back.