Bodegas Los Bermejos 2023 Listan Negro Rosado (Rose from Canary Islands)

This is a dry, mouth-watering wine with a complex minerality. It offers a complex, medium-weight mouthfeel but finishes with a refreshing lick of acidity. The wine is perfect for pairing with the fruits of the sea, but expands to pair well with light-medium weight dishes. Imagine sipping it at a cafe table on Lanzarote, the island of its origin, as you gaze out at the beuty of the island's black-sand beaches and the beach-goers enjoying them.

The vineyards on Lanzarote are like none we've ever seen. Imagine rows of bowl-shaped craters, each ~20 feet across, with a single massive grape vine at the bottom and a stone wall covering half the bowl's rim on the windward side. A number of vineyard techniques unique to this volcanic island, each one implemented to protect the vine from the ever-present winds. Pull back for a wide-angle view and the vineyard looks like the pock-marked surface of the moon, only the soil is black volcanic sand!

Never heard of the Listan Negro grape? Of the 1,000+ grapes used to make wine around the globe, this one is quite rare. It is nearly exclusive to the Canary islands and the Southern portions of Spain.

The Canary Islands are a Spanish archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean about 60 miles west of Morocco. Rising from the ocean 11 million years ago, today they are the southernmost of Spain's communities, producing wines on six of the islands. A winemaker faces many challenges on the island of Lanzarote, as it is hot and humid with high winds and black volcanic soils - not exactly ideal conditions for wine grapes. But the islands are home to some of the oldest own-rooted (i.e., ungrafted!) vines in all of Europe. The wines they produce are exciting, fairly recently exploding onto the international wine scene.

One of the features of Canary Island vines is that they were never infected by Phylloxera so their average age can be well over 100 years old, with the low yields and great complexity a winemaker can obtain in no other way.

The island of Lanzarote was the bread basket for the Canary Island until the 1700s, when the volcano became active for months and months, covering the entire island in a topsoil of black volcanic ash. This change in soil type favored grape vines over more traditional crops, as grapes tend to thrive in poor soils.