Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 34

IN HIS LATEST BOOK, VOLCANIC WINE, JOHN SZABO, MS,
DESCRIBES THE RESEARCH JUAN JESÚS MÉNDEZ HAS
SPEARHEADED ON LOCAL VARIETIES. After a brief correspondence with Méndez regarding listán prieto and

The vines at Margalagua, in Taganana,
on the northeastern tip of Tenerife,
grow untrained, as they do in the
sands of Colares, west of Lisbon.

WINE & SPIRITS

AUGUST 2018

listán negro-the subject of a DNA study Méndez
had undertaken with the Universidad Rovira i Virgili de Tarragona-I arrived at his Jardín des Variedades Canarias, outside the conical stone building
he designed as his winery, Viñátigo. Intent on determining whether it was, in fact, listán prieto or listán
negro that traveled to the New World to become país
(mission), I peppered him with questions.
Méndez patiently explained that what is called
listán prieto is, in fact, genetically the same as listán negro. But whatever clarity his research offered,
others refuted (several growers told me that the vine
called listán negro on the island of Gran Canaria is,
in fact, listán prieto, while the listán negro they grow
on Tenerife is different).
I lost interest in deciphering his DNA satellite analyses when Méndez headed down the circular stairs
of his cellar, past the first floor where he presses his
grapes and stores his white wine, down to the second level into the hillside, where two clay amphorae
from Catalonia stand sentinel over a collection of
vats and barrels: a mad scientist's cave. And Méndez
does have the facts-are-facts demeanor of a scientist,
even if he is also one of the most intuitive winegrowers on the island, farming vines up and down its hills
and recombining the grapes in fascinating ways.
He makes one of his most delicious whites from
marmajuelo, a variety Méndez grows at sea level and
makes into a firmly structured wine with salty mineral acidity and the yellow citrus fruit flavor of Buddha's hand. (Sarah Tracey, the wine buyer at Rouge
Tomate Chelsea in New York City, was so taken by
this wine on her recent visit to Viñátigo that she has
started Marmajuelo Mondays at the restaurant.)
Among his reds, the wine that caught my attention was Ancestrales, a blend of red varieties Méndez started making in 2014. He ferments it in open
wooden vats with whole clusters and with yeasts
selected at each vineyard parcel. Once the fermentation is complete, he covers the vat and leaves the
wine to age for a year.
Half of the blend is baboso negro, a synonym for
alfrocheiro, a variety that produces a light, brisk red
in the granite soils of Portugal's Dão. It has a completely different character in Tenerife, still floral but
significantly fuller.
The other half is tintilla (which may be a synonym
of bastardo in Portugal and Spain, and trousseau in
Jura), grown at 2,460 feet. He finds the vines at this
high altitude reliably mature the wood in their grape
stems while the grapes are still fresh. So he includes
the stems in the fermentation, giving tintilla a primary structural role in the blend. Baboso provides
the floral scents of violets while tintilla gives black
fruit and dark chocolate tones. It's a combination of
spice and intensity, with gentleness to the volcanic

photo (left) by Jimmy Hayes; top left, top right and prior pages by Joshua Greene

"In this area, the
plates are pulling
apart. We have
young soils with
very little clay, and
they transmit a lot of
minerality."
-Juan Jesús Méndez

earth. Twelve nearby villages were buried in lava,
while other locals fled and waited out six years of
life near what appeared to be the gates of Hell. Then
they found that the thick layer of volcanic ash, which
had buried their soil more than three feet below the
ground, held enough moisture that vines could now
survive. When the dust cleared, they developed a
kind of upside-down viticulture, digging through the
ash to plant the vines directly into the soil, the holes
sometimes ten feet deep, the vine canopies peeking
out of the black ash, protected from the winds by
low walls of stone.
On Tenerife, the frequent volcanic activity has
generated enough basalt to build an island over the
course of seven million years (the age of the oldest
rock found on the island). That basalt formed a range
of peaks at the center of the island, with El Teide rising the highest. Those mountains block the Saharan
winds, creating a desert climate on the south side.
In contrast, the north side, awash in arctic currents,
looks a bit like northern Portugal and Spain's Galicia:
lush and green. But nowhere on the islands do the
vines see a cold freeze-you have to head high into
the hills for snow, the white peak of El Teide clearly
visible from other islands in winter. Meanwhile, people are swimming in the south and the vines on the
north are resting dormant through a mild off-season.

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