Listán Negro

Listán Negro is the island red par excellence, the grape half the Canaries plant when they aren’t planting white. On Lanzarote it grows in the same black earth as the Malvasía, and it gives a red that has nothing to do with what you’d expect from one: light-bodied, spiced, with fresh red fruit and that smoky note the volcanic soil lends it.

It’s not a red for cellaring or for the armchair, it’s a table red made for the fridge: give it half an hour in the chiller, drink it cool and you get why the islands take their reds this way. Ungrafted, old vines, no phylloxera. If you come from the Rioja–Ribera world, this one throws you; go with it.