Bodegas Viñátigo Maipé de Taganaña Tenerife 2024
£31.45
The wine
Shy at first, this opens up to reveal intriguing spicy notes alongside subtle stone fruit. The palate is broad and rich, defined by a distinct saline character that speaks of its terroir. Taganaña is one of the most remote and dramatic vineyard sites in Europe.
Taganana is one of the most extraordinary vineyard sites in Europe, a remote village on the Anaga peninsula at the north-eastern tip of Tenerife, where terraced plots cling to slopes above the Atlantic and are worked entirely by hand. The vines are ungrafted, ancient and often trained in the braided cordon trenzado.
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.
