Region & History

Long before any European planted a vine here, the Guanches lived on the islands. They knew nothing of wine. That changed only with the Castilian conquest, which ended in 1496 when the last princes of Tenerife surrendered to the military commander Alonso Fernández de Lugo — La Palma had already fallen in 1493. The new rulers first planted sugarcane. Only once cheaper cane sugar from overseas pushed Canary sugar out of the market did sugarcane give way to the vine, and within just a few decades wine became the islands' most important export.

Sweet, powerful, and fortified with brandy to survive the long sea voyage: this is how merchants shipped the new export wine, Malvasía, to England, where it became known as Canary Sack. At the English court it turned into a status symbol. Even Shakespeare had his characters call for it: in Twelfth Night, the drunken Sir Toby Belch demands a cup of canary. By the late sixteenth century, almost eighty-five percent of Tenerife's production was heading to English ports.

In 1665, England even founded its own trading company for it, the Canary Company. In 1681, more than four and a half million bottles left the islands, most of them from Tenerife. The rise was as swift as the later fall. When English merchants turned to cheaper Madeira in the eighteenth century, Canary wine lost its most important market, and many vineyards fell into disuse.

What the vineyards still lack today is phylloxera, which devastated the rest of Europe starting in 1863 — a rarity across the whole continent. The islands lie far from the trade routes the pest traveled along, and their volcanic soil of loose ash offers it little foothold. That's why many vines here still grow on their own, ungrafted rootstock, known as pie franco, some of them over a hundred years old.

Here, the volcano is no chapter of the past but a neighbor. In 2021, the eruption of Tajogaite on La Palma buried around 370 hectares of farmland under lava, banana plantations and vineyards alike. Even so, wine continues to be made on seven islands, today under eleven appellations: ten for individual islands, plus, since 2011, the shared Denominación de Origen Islas Canarias.