Bodegas Viñátigo Listán Negro Tenerife 2025
£21.45
The wine
Listán Negro is the red counterpart to the island's white workhorse, and grows nowhere outside the Canaries. Ungrafted vines on black volcanic soil give a red of real lift: red berry fruit, violet and a smoky, peppery edge that no mainland grape quite matches. Serve it cool.
Listán Negro is the red counterpart, and it is grown almost nowhere outside the Canaries. On black volcanic soils it gives a pale, aromatic red with a distinctive smoky, faintly balsamic character and moderate tannin, and it is best served with a slight chill. Ungrafted vines, as everything here is.
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.
