Viñátigo Maipe de Taganana Vino de Parcela 2024

Juan Jesús Méndez is basically the keeper of Canary Island wine memory. Fourth generation, spent his whole life tracking down forgotten grapes that were about to disappear. Now his son Jorge is taking over. Jorge worked all over—Spain, Burgundy, Chile, Argentina—and now he's back, looking for micro-vineyards so extreme they feel like secrets.

Maipe is one of those places. It's in Taganana, a tiny village in the Anaga Massif, northeast Tenerife. The vines were planted ungrafted more than 120 years ago. Then in the early 1900s, a landslide buried the whole vineyard. For a hundred years, the vines slowly unburied themselves, pushing up through the rocks. Now it looks like something out of a dream: massive white boulders everywhere, vines climbing out from underneath them like octopuses defying nature.

Jorge fermented the grapes with native yeasts in amphora, no racking, then aged it a few months in neutral French oak. He wanted to respect the old traditional methods of the area that have always given Taganana wines that golden, slightly oxidized hue.

The wine is complex. Smells like gun powder, thyme, fennel, honeysuckle, a little forest floor. On the palate it's dense and ample from all that time on the lees, but there's this natural acidity that gives it tension and structure.