Suertes del Marqués

In the Valle de la Orotava the vines are not trained on wires or as bushes: they are braided. The cordón trenzado is the valley's traditional system and consists of weaving the plant's branches together like a rope; on very old vines those branches can reach fifteen metres in length.

And they are on their own roots, ungrafted, because phylloxera never reached the islands.

The project started in 2006 with the García family, who wanted to give their ancestors' vineyards their due, and today it is led by Jonatan García Lima. They own eleven hectares in the valley, between 300 and 750 metres, and manage another seventeen from local growers. They work Listán Negro and Listán Blanco. The plots here are called «suertes», and that is where the house's name comes from.

Las Suertes comes from a 0.75-hectare plot with vines around a hundred years old, between 480 and 520 metres, on sandy-loam soils and trained as cordón trenzado. It is 100% Listán Negro and picked by hand into sixteen-kilo crates.

It ferments with whole bunches in concrete tanks, with no temperature control and native yeasts, and ages eleven months on its own lees in used 500-litre barrels. There were 4,100 bottles.