Tenerife

Tenerife has more vineyard than any other Canary island, and it’s the one that resists a tidy summary. Mount Teide sits right in the middle at 3,718 metres, and that changes everything: the island is really a pile of different slopes wrapped around a volcano, with northern flanks catching the trade-wind moisture and southern ones where almost nothing falls. Soil, altitude, light and wine all change from one valley to the next.

Which is why there are five denominations of origin on an island you can drive across in an hour and a half: Tacoronte-Acentejo and Valle de La Orotava on the northern side, Ycoden-Daute-Isora in the north-west, Valle de Güímar on the south-eastern flank and Abona in the south, home to the highest vineyards in Spain. And above all of them —or alongside, depending on how you look at it— DOP Islas Canarias, which covers the whole archipelago and gets used here too.

What they share is the stuff you can’t see: ungrafted vines that never met phylloxera, soils of ash and lava, and a set of grapes —listán blanco, listán negro, marmajuelo, negramoll— that doesn’t exist anywhere else. What separates them is everything else.