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Tanajara baboso
red aged one year

It puts three very important components of the current situation of Canary wines: the island of El Hierro, the Baboso Negro variety, and powerful red wines…
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Tanajara
verijadiego red aged
7 months

With every passing day it proves its great potential for storage and elegant way of aging. It has delicate and delicious bouquet…
(Keep reading)
A flurry of media attention greeted its entry into the market in 2003: it was the revelation of the year on an international scale, and great restaurants were fighting for bottles of its limited production. Made from the Baboso variety, which was practically unknown at the time, its sudden fame encouraged many growers throughout the islands to begin cultivating the grape. What was happening? “It arose at a time when Parker-style wines were hip, highly-concentrated and very powerful wines, the type that includes the Baboso,” explains vintner, researcher, and entrepreneur Juan Jesús Méndez.

It all started when Gonzalo Padrón, a student of Juan Jesús Méndez at the Agricultural School of Tacoronte (Tenerife), told him about a traditional variety that his family used to cultivate on El Hierro

It all started when Gonzalo Padrón, a student of his at the Agricultural School of Tacoronte (Tenerife), told him about a traditional variety that his family used to cultivate on El Hierro, an island on which exclusive and very old varieties that were hardly known in the rest of the archipelago grew. “It seemed interesting, so I arranged a trip and we brought back some of the grapes to make microvinifications at Bodegas Viñátigo,” says Juan Jesús. The results were so good that he and the brothers, Gonzalo and Pedro Padrón, decided to build a winery on the island to produce two types of red monovarietals using Boboso Negro and Verijadiego Negra grapes.

Access to the underground Viñátigo winery.
Oddly, the Tanajara from the second grape has gone almost unnoticed after the overwhelming success of the Baboso. Juan Jesús relates this to the fact that “the Vijariego, as it is called in Tenerife, is a wine similar to a Burgundy, much less concentrated, much more subtle and delicate, and it was not the right moment for this sort of wine. If it had been 2014, the most outstanding wine on the market would have been the Vijariego and the Baboso would have been relegated to second place, because today we’re seeing the opposite tendency.”

In 2001, when the Protected Denomination of Origin Islas Canarias was established, these wines stopped being produced on El Hierro, because of the extra costs that that would incur. The grape is harvested there, but it is transported in refrigerated trucks to Bodegas Viñátigo, where it is distributed under the new winery’s name: Viñátigo Baboso Negro and Viñátigo Ensamblaje Tinto (from Baboso Negro, Tintilla, and Vijariego Negro). Nevertheless, we felt that it was important to include this winery from El Hierro, even though it has stopped manufacturing wines, because of the indispensability of their wines when it comes to getting to know the viniculture of the Canary Islands (and there are still bottles from 2009 and 2010 to be put on the market).

Bodegas Tanajara SL
Oficinas en Bodegas Viñátigo. Travesía Juan Dana, s/n, 38440 La Guancha (Tenerife), Islas Canarias (España)

Phone number: (34) 922 828 768
Email: tanajara@vinatigo.com
Home pages: www.tanajara.com y www.vinatigo.com


● This winery has stopped manufacturing wines and moved its production to Bodegas Viñátigo.
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