Michael Candelario Blanco 2025: the cult white from La Palma that everyone is hunting for

One day I put the 2025 white from Michael Candelario in the fridge to chill and, when my wife spotted the bottle in there, a “Well, well, well!” rang out through the whole house. She knew what was coming.

Because the 2024 knocked me sideways. So much so that I could barely make sense of what my body was telling me. I drank three bottles over the year and still hadn’t worked it out.

A 26-year-old at over 1,000 metres

Michael Candelario makes wine in Puntagorda, in the north-west of La Palma, and he’s 26. And watch the “only”: it’s not “too young to know what he’s doing”, it’s that he’s got his whole life ahead of him to keep growing and creating. No pressure, Mike. Though his white is already a cult wine: people hunt it down across the islands, mainland Spain and abroad, and it reaches countries like the United States, Sweden, Germany and Italy.

He’s the fourth generation of a family of growers and the first to bottle under the family name. Until he came along, the grapes were sold to other wineries on the island. He studied at the agricultural school in Tacoronte, did stints on Tenerife and released his first vintage in 2023, the year a wildfire damaged part of his plots and forced him to buy in grapes to save the harvest, according to Canarian television. Not the comfiest way to start.

The vines sit on steep terraces, in a range from 800 to 1,450 metres, on basaltic clay with red stones. There are six-year-old vines (planted by him) and vines of well over a hundred, some from his great-grandfather, all farmed organically. According to the importer, a good chunk of them sit above the cloud line.

The white is a blend of Listán Blanco, Vijariego Blanco and Albillo Criollo. That last one deserves a paragraph: it has nothing to do with the albillos of mainland Spain, it’s a Canarian cross of Listán Blanco and Verdello, and there are only around 26 hectares registered in the entire archipelago. On La Palma it lives up in the north-west. It gives wines with peach, tropical fruit, citrus and white flowers, and plenty of acidity. Which, funnily enough, sounds a lot like what I found in my glass.

As for how it’s made, what I’ve found is for the 2024, so take it as a guide rather than a 2025 spec sheet: hand-picked grapes, whole-cluster pressed, fermentation and malolactic with native yeasts in used French oak, about nine months on fine lees, a tiny touch of sulphur at bottling and no fining or filtering. On top of that, the importer says it’s a little more generous than the typical reductive Canarian white.

Tasting: gone before you’ve finished working it out

This time I made myself pay attention. So with the next bottle I can just float.

Peach, loquat and lemon peel over a base of white fruit. It has a sweetish feel in the mouth, but a refreshing one, with a touch of spritz that makes it lighter still. A little gas like that isn’t unusual in wines that are unfiltered with little sulphur, and that may be where it comes from.

And the funny thing is that, by the time you’ve worked out what’s going on, it’s almost gone. It’s suddenly vanished from your mouth, but it leaves a memory that within two seconds turns into the need to go back to the glass. It’s gone before you’ve finished understanding it, and that’s cheating.

Maybe that’s the answer to the three bottles of the 2024: it wasn’t that I couldn’t work it out, it’s that the wine won’t let you.

What should you drink it with?

Something that won’t fight it: a light, fresh white like this wants a simple table. Grilled fish, a mild cheese, seafood, or just a pre-dinner nibble with something salty. Serve it cold, but not ice-cold, so the fruit has somewhere to show up.

If you fancy comparing it with another Canarian white made from Listán Blanco, Burgmann’s Olivia is the flip side: lees, barrel and plenty of body, in the north of Tenerife. Two islands, the same grape and two ways of catching you out.

Lucky us.