Climate change alters the biorhythm of Tenerife wine but not its quality

«Harvesting used to start between August and September but in the last 15 years it has been brought forward with the rise in temperatures, so much so that this year we have had to start it earlier than ever, the earliest in the northern hemisphere: at the beginning of July”. Juan Jesús Méndez tells it while he makes a point to open one of the stainless steel tanks and explain the “magical process” of fermentation. “Look how the juice of the grape boils naturally. It is the yeast that contains the fruit eating the sugars and giving off carbon dioxide. It only happens with white wine. That is why people from before said that the musts are boiling.

Outside, at 30 degrees, under an open sky that clearly reveals the majesty of the Teide and in the middle of the northern midlands stretched out to the sea, there is little left for the earth to boil. It is the sensation that is breathed a kilometer from the winery, on the border between La Guancha and San Juan de la Rambla. There is one of the plantations that supply Viñátigo: El Mazapé farm. Along with four other grape harvesters, the ramblero Coré Palmés collects the clusters of one of the most prized varieties that survived the phylloxera in the island bubble: Malvasia. “This grape is marvelous”, he affirms, to add: “It is hard to work with this solajero but it must be done now because the fruit is at its perfect point”, he details.

ripening point

Excessive heat turns part of the grapes into raisins and speeds up the biorhythm of the plant. Juan Jesús Méndez qualifies, however, that even so it is possible to reach the ideal point of maturation to make the wine. «It arrives earlier but the perfect balance between sugars and acidity is always achieved. That is why there is less quantity but the same quality as always”, specifies this chemist and oenologist who has investigated local varieties, such as this Malvasia and other unique ones from the Archipelago.

While the growers sweat it out to collect the vine in El Mazapé, at the winery headquarters they prepare the boxes to sell the 27 Viñátigo brands around the world (18 countries). And it is that 70% of the production of this firm is for export. The most select customers and the most prestigious restaurants in the United States, Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Mexico and Japan demand these and other bottles from the different denominations of origin of the Islands. They continue to cause a furore outside Canary Islands after they already did it at the time of the independence of the United States or the English writer William Shakespeare. So much so that the production is dispatched in specialized stores despite the fact that the price is multiplied by four outside of Spain. Viñátigo alone sells 150,000 bottles a year of up to 12 varieties, the majority exclusive to the Archipelago.

Why are the Viñátigos on the menus of such prestigious restaurants as Enigma, by Albert Adriá in Barcelona, ​​Eleven, in New York, or Alinea, in Chicago? Juan Jesús Méndez explains it: “Customers are looking for more and more different wines, with other nuances, less homogeneous than the French and Spanish classics. That is the great advantage of the Canary Islands, that differentiation provided by the varieties that were saved here from phylloxera, while they disappeared in the rest of Europe, and the aromas generated by the volcanic soil. These are characteristics that are not going to succumb to climate change.”

To satisfy the most exquisite palates, this winery has vines that occupy an area of ​​15 hectares. Viñátigo completes its stock with the purchase of different types of grapes from 60 small producers on the Island. Only El Mazapé, with 25 years behind it, has five hectares. “Try a grape,” requests the manager of the winery. “Don’t you see how sweet but sour at the same time they are? That is the perfect point to decide that the time for the harvest has arrived”, Juan Jesús Méndez qualifies at one end of the farm.

Méndez is very clear that global warming is “obvious”, especially in a summer, the current one, in which heat waves occur – at this moment the Canary Islands suffer the third of this summer period – and they do not stop beating records of maximum temperatures in the whole planet. But he is also clear that climate change has not only accelerated plant processes and stressed them, but has forced the wine industry to turn to technology to meet the challenges it poses. “We must take global warming seriously once and for all and adopt drastic solutions. The land deserts, loses nutrients and there is less and less fertile space for agriculture. To these problems, the oenologist adds the loss of crops –at a rate, only in grapes, of 300 hectares per year– because “there is no generational change”. “We have to make the primary sector more profitable for young people to join.”

Bet on innovation

For these reasons, Viñátigo has placed special emphasis on sustainability and innovation, paths followed by other wineries in the Canary Islands. For example, it has its own treatment plant that has the capacity to treat 3,000 liters of water per day, most of which is reused. Likewise, its production is one hundred percent organic. “We do not use a single chemical to treat the crops; everything is natural, ”says Méndez. Farms such as El Mazapé also have a vegetation cover that plays a fundamental role in the proper development of the plants. “These plant covers, in addition to providing nutrients and maintaining humidity, are also a pollution sink, thereby improving the environment of the entire environment.”

And then there is technology. Viñátigo uses the Sentinel satellites of the European Space Agency to monitor the state of their crops and prevent possible diseases. More than 700 kilometers from Earth, these observation systems are equipped with cameras and sensors of such precision that they can measure the temperature of the leaves of the vineyards of the Tenerife winery. The brand also has agreements with other institutions and companies –such as Ec2ce, specialized in artificial intelligence– to use drones or develop mathematical models that improve crop yields. Juan Jesús Méndez himself controls all the activity of the winery in real time thanks to various applications on his mobile phone.

All this is combined with multiple investigations on soil fertility or the evolution of Canarian strains. In the same headquarters of the winery in La Guancha, adapted to the environment and whose foundations use natural rocks generated by ancient volcanic eruptions, Méndez treasures a white wine from 1696 that he found in a Monteverde family winery. Turned into a kind of syrup and blackened by dehydration for 327 years, he sometimes mixes it with new wine, obtaining a product that is a time machine.

Another fundamental section is promotion, a pillar for the profitability of this liquid gold. One of Viñátigo’s main economic items, more than 100,000 euros a year, is allocated to this facet. The winery is committed to inviting highly prestigious professionals to its facilities, as well as organizing tours that do not exceed a dozen people. Next year it will open a bar and improve the whole environment. Visitors live an experience in which they are not only immersed in the world of Tenerife viticulture, but also in that of gastronomy and history.

In El Mazapé, day laborers finish the day’s harvest. 500 kilos of malvasia are transferred to the winery in a truck. Bottles like those of the Viñátigo Ensamblaje Blanco brand will come out of them. In addition to Malvasia, it has grapes of the gual, marmajuelo, vijariego and verdello varieties. They are obtained in farms distributed at different altitude levels for a total of one thousand meters. A sip of this fruity delicacy is a journey through the flavors of Tenerife’s geography, from the coast to the midlands.