Bodegas Viñátigo Ensamblaje Blanco Tenerife 2024
£28.95
The wine
Captivating and intensely aromatic, with notes of apricot, pineapple and mint layered over a smoky minerality. The palate is deep and textured, balanced by a brilliant saline acidity and a long, persistent finish. Six Canary varieties, none of them grown anywhere else.
Ensamblaje means assembly, and the wine brings together four Canary whites: Marmajuelo, Gual, Vijariego and Malvasia. All four were close to extinction within living memory. Blending them is a deliberate statement about what the islands can do with their own material rather than with imported varieties.
The producer
Bodegas Viñátigo
View all Bodegas Viñátigo winesBodegas 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.
