Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 35

minerality that sets it apart. Finesse is not a word I
have often associated with Canary Island wines of
the past, but this wine has it, with a flavor that lasts
for minutes.
LA GUANCHA, WHERE MÉNDEZ IS BASED, IS DIRECTLY
NORTH OF THE PICO DEL TEIDE. If you head east along
the coast, you would arrive in the Orotava Valley,
formed by a landslide some 600,000 years ago, likely
caused by the ground collapsing around a volcanic
caldera. Today, the green hills and cliffs are blanketed with vines, many of them woven into long,
parallel braids, as if they were cornrows on the head
of a giant. Jonatan García, who farms a patchwork
of vineyards here, describes these braided vines as
trenzado, and explains that many date back to the
19th century; he shows off the trunks of some of the
older beasts that split in four or five directions. While
García has trained most of his newer plantings to a
double cordon trellis, his old vines, with bunches
of canes lashed together in twisted masses, seem to
determine their own fate, growing up to 75 feet long.
García took charge of winegrowing here in 2016,
though he has run Suertes del Marqués since he and
his father, Francisco Javier, established it in 2006. Up
until 2016, he'd been running his family's furniture
factory, a business that had been successful enough
to allow his father to start buying vineyards in 1986,
and build the family home on a high hill in the midst
of those vines.
García says his tastes have evolved since he started
in the wine business, when he began to spend the
better part of his paycheck buying Burgundy and
German riesling, and lost interest in most of the
local reds. One year in, he was already searching for
a new winemaker when a young oenologist came
to visit. Roberto Santana was born in Tenerife, but
was making monastrell on the mainland in Jumilla.
After seeing the García's vineyards, he wrote to Francisco Javier, who suggested Jonatan call him in for an
interview. They ended up working together for eight
years, and soon drew the attention of José Pastor, an
importer based in Fairfax, California, who was busy
introducing the American market to Canary Islands
wines. "Jonatan had sent me his wines in vinegar bottles, and I never responded to him," Pastor told me,
recalling a visit to Tenerife in 2010. "Then, the day
I was leaving the island, a retailer told me to go visit
there-that the winemaker, Roberto, is from Tenerife, and they are bottling by vineyard sites, using concrete, using stems." Rather than catch his flight, he
went to see Jonatan. "I was blown away by all these
crazy old trenzado vineyards. And Roberto was talking about the position of the vineyards...about farming without chemicals. He was talking a language I
hadn't heard before on the Canary Islands."

After the 2015 vintage, García
and Santana parted ways. García
hoped to make some changes in
the Suertes del Marqués wines,
and coaxed some help out of
Luis Seabra, who had headed
up the winemaking team at
Niepoort in the Douro for ten
years before striking out on his
own. "I told him he was crazy,"
Seabra recalls. "I would never
take a plane to make wines. But
he said, 'Okay, just come and
visit me.' We spent two days seeing all those vineyards, more
than a hundred years old...and
I couldn't resist."
Judging from the 2016 wines,
García's collaboration with
Seabra has taken his wines to a
new level. Today, in the wines
from his top parcels at Suertes
del Marqués-including El
Esquilón and El Ciruelo-García
works with all whole bunches,
long macerations and avoids
using pumps at any point during the winemaking process. He
is also making harvest decisions
based more on freshness than
ripeness. "2016 is our warmest vintage," García says,
"and we made the freshest vintage in the cellar."
García explains that the 2016 El Esquilón is listán negro from a vineyard rising to 1,640 feet in altitude-high enough to allow you to see the sea in the
distance. And the flavors have the brisk freshness and
salinity of a coastal wine. What sets it apart is the
purity of the fruit, the fresh raspberry scent unhindered by rustic tannins. Instead, the tannins are spicy
in their youthful power, gripping in their dark earthiness, supporting the fruit without masking it.
Then he pours a 2016 El Ciruelo, from a parcel
of 100-year-old listán negro vines slightly higher up
the hill. The vine rows run north to south, receiving
sun on both sides, García says, an orientation he has
come to prefer over the east-west rows at El Esquilón.
He made the wine with whole bunches, foot trodden, in the same way as El Esquilón, but El Ciruelo
is more intense in structure, its power delivered without any sense of weight. It's gamey and savory, a fragrant young wine with the grace to live for decades,
or so it would seem at this early moment in its life.
Out of the range of wines from Suertes del Marqués, these latest vintages from the single parcels
stand as some of the most profound wines you can
find in Iberia.

"We don't know the
origin of the cordon
trenzado. It could
be from Portugal,
or created here.
Normally it's two
different arms that
are five meters long.
But a vine might
have one, two or five
arms, and an arm
might stretch to 25
meters."
-Jonatan García

WINE & SPIRITS

AUGUST 2018

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