Tim Atkin MW: The highs of Tenerife

By Tim Atkin

Published: 07 February, 2025

Where are the highest vineyards in Europe? Switzerland? The Alto Adige perhaps? Both have sites that are vertiginous when you compare them to most of the continent’s classic wine regions. But the correct answer is Spain. Not Gredos or Ribera del Duero, both of which are pretty elevated, but Tenerife. Piedra Fluida’s Los Frontones vineyard in Vilaflor sits at a lofty 1,687m.

A grape grower in Switzerland might choose to dispute this. Are the Canary Islands really part of Europe? They are much closer to Morocco than to Madrid, let alone to the southern coast of Spain, described by Canarios as “the peninsula”. Politically speaking, Tenerife and the other six main islands are part of the European Union, but they have a character and a sub-tropical landscape that is all their own: part Spanish, part Portuguese, part-Atlantic, part-amalgam of all sorts of things.

Because of the way the trade winds, known as los alisios, work in this part of the Atlantic, Tenerife, as the largest of the Canaries, was a staging post for ships traversing that vast ocean. The crossing is less perilous these days, but history confronts you at every turn. In the week I spent visiting vineyards, I had conversations about Lord Nelson, Alexander Humboldt, Christopher Columbus, Captain Arthur Philip and Agatha Christie.

Read more: Five minutes with Stephen Duckett, Hundred Hills Winery

These days, of course, most visitors arrive by air, not sea. Tenerife is best known for tourism, especially as a magnet for sun-starved northern Europeans escaping winter. If the planes keep landing and the sun keeps shining, Tenerife works economically. Rainfall might be increasingly scarce – Roberto Santana of Envínate danced for joy when a thunderstorm arrived in January after months of drought – but that’s unlikely to worry someone on a package holiday.

What about the wine industry and its 1,761ha? Well, it too is historic in its way. The first vines were planted on Tenerife in 1497. By the 16th century, Canary wine was famous. Authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Herman Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson all wrote about it. But then its reputation went into a nosedive. Malvasía Aromática, the most celebrated local grape, retained some of its lustre, but wines from the island were mostly drunk locally or not at all.

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Unique grapes

Things got so bad in the 1980s that people started abandoning local varieties and planting grapes from elsewhere to “improve” the local vineyards with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah. New barrel salesmen also started to have some success. The person who deserves most credit for saving the Tenerife wine industry and its unique selection of grapes is Juan Jesús Méndez of Bodegas Viñátigo, who started to rescue, collect and plant many of them again in the early 1990s, followed soon afterwards by the Cumbres de Abona co-operative. The first Denominación de Origen – Tacoronte-Acentejo was also created in 1992.

Those grapes are both fascinating and diverse. The official list (including the French interlopers) runs to 33 varieties, some of which also have several synonyms. They are a mixture, as ever, of the Spanish and the Portuguese, as well as some, like Listán Negro, that crossed in the vineyards here and one, Listán Prieto, that was to go on to colonise the New World as País, Mission and Criolla Chica.

The next stage of Tenerife’s modern wine revolution was the focus on single parcel wines, first by Jonatan García of Suertes del Marqués in 2006 and then by Roberto Santana, who worked for him before leaving to set up his own project, called Envínate, with three friends. Some of these plots are well into their second century, producing wines that are both distinctive and extremely complex.

Other bodegas worth seeking out, many of them working with small parcels of local grapes, are Altos de Tr3vejos, Ambora, Arautava, Atrevino, Borja Pérez, Finca Vegas, Hermanos Mesa, Juan Francisco Fariña, Linaje del Pago, LoHer, Piedra Fluida, Presas Ocampo, Tempus, Tierra Fundida, Vento and Viñátigo. There has been a significant jump in quality since I last visited in 2019, with more bodegas entering the market.

Does Tenerife have a best variety? To some, it’s Malvasía Aromática, particularly when sweet. To others, it’s one or more of the island’s reds, sometimes in combination: Baboso, Listán Negro, Listán Prieto, Negramoll, Vijariego Negro. But for me, the superstar is Listán Blanco, otherwise known as Palomino in Jerez. Grown in the best sites, most of which are at altitude or on the cooler north side of the island, it’s world class. Even the Swiss would agree with that.

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