Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 36

ing that the iron in the red soils would give hard,
rustic tannins. By 2015, he began to reconsider his
strategy. "Talking with local people, they always used
to make the wine as a blend of red and white varieties.
So in 2015, we started to coferment the red varieties
with ten to fifteen percent of white varieties (mostly
listán blanco), all harvested on the same day, working
with all the stems (trodden by foot, so there was no
carbonic maceration), and working without any cooling. We just let the temperatures go. When we saw
the results, that was the wine that we had in mind.
With that terroir. When we tried the same vinification with terroir from black basalt, the wines were
very fat." The new wine caused Santana to reassess
what he thought he knew.
"That is a beautiful thing in our profession," he
told me, "that each day we learn a lot, and we cannot
work with recipes."
Today, his Táganan Parcela Margalagua is a blend
based on negramoll, with a significant contribution
from listán negro and small amounts of baboso, malvasia negra and listán gacho (a pink mutation of the
grape). It includes 15 percent white grapes in a cofermentation in concrete tanks; then Santana ages it in
neutral 228-liter barrels. That 2017, tasted out of barrel, was the most elegant and precise wine I found on
this first trip to Tenerife.
Later, when a group of us opened a magnum of the
2016 on our last night on the island, it only strengthened that impression-a wine that could stand in the
company of great Burgundy, not to mimic it, but to
share a profound sense of its own place. n

When the Margalagua
vines bear fruit, the
vineyard team props
the canes on wooden
cradles while the
grapes ripen.

36

WINE & SPIRITS

AUGUST 2018

photos: Margalagua by Amanda Gill; Roberto Santana by Joshua Greene

"The picon (volcanic
ash, in the hills of
Santiago del Teide)
is from 1909, the last
eruption in Tenerife."
-Roberto Santana

YOU HAVE TO TRAVEL TO THE NORTHEASTERN TIP OF
TENERIFE, TO TAGANANA, TO FIND A WINE THAT'S COMPARABLE IN ELEGANCE AND, PERHAPS, MORE ASTONISHING IN ITS DELICATE POWER. The Margalagua Vineyard is directly on the sea, rising up in steep, rocky
outcrops, with vines interspersed in their midst. The
soil here is red basalt, what locals call tosca roja, its
crumbly alteration allowing roots to go deep. Above
ground the vines grow without any training at all,
as they do in the sands of Colares on Portugal's farwestern coast, held up by cradles of sticks when they
begin to fruit.
Roberto Santana first discovered this vineyard
through a friend, Santiago Yanes, a lawyer and local
historian who pointed him toward Taganana as having been an important area for vines in the 16th and
17th centuries. In 2011, Yanes introduced Santana
to José Angel Alonso, a grower with parcels in Margalagua. And once they began working together,
Alonso introduced Santana to other growers.
At the time, Santana was still working with Suertes
del Marqués, and had started a partnership with three
young winemakers in other regions of Spain, all making wines together, near vineyards they could arrange
to manage directly, and bottling them as Envínate.
He made the first wine from Margalagua in 2012, in
the cellars at Suertes del Marqués. By 2015, he and
his Envínate team were managing close to 80 percent
of the vines in Margalagua.
In his first vintages making wine from the vineyard, Santana controlled the temperature of the fermentation and did no extended maceration, believ-



Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - August 2018

Contents
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - Cover1
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - Cover2
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 1
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 2
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 3
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 4
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - Contents
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 6
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 7
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 8
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 9
Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - 10
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Wine & Spirits - August 2018 - Cover3
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