On Limnos the fire went out eighteen million years ago. On Tenerife it last showed itself in 1909. Etna is erupting as I write this. What the three share is the ground those fires left behind, because volcanic soil shapes a wine more than almost any soil on earth.
Most vineyard soil is ancient, what’s left of mountains that wore down over tens of millions of years. Volcanic soil arrives all at once. On Etna the growers can tell you the year the lava under a given parcel arrived; a vineyard on the 1614 flow is not the same as one on the 1879, and they can taste the difference. The Canary Islands, which include Tenerife, came up over a hotspot in the earth’s mantle, one island at a time while the African plate crept northwest an inch a year. And the Greeks knew fire had made Limnos long before anyone could have watched it burn. They called it The Ashen One and put Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, there when Zeus threw him out of heaven. In the Iliad, ships sail from Limnos with wine for the army at Troy.
What that soil does for a vine is straightforward. Ash and pumice hold almost no water, so roots go deep and the vine works for everything it gets. The rock gives up potassium, iron, and magnesium but very little nitrogen, so there is what the vine needs to ripen fruit and not much to spend on leaves. Small berries. Nothing wasted. It is stress in the useful direction.
Which brings us to the wines. From Tenerife, a white grown on the eastern slopes below Teide, from a family that has been working the same ground since just after WWII. From Etna, Sicily’s answer to Nebbiolo: a Nerello Mascalese that grows almost nowhere but this mountain. And from Limnos, something older than either: a wine made the way Greeks were making it when the ships sailed for Troy (and made almost nowhere else now).
Volcanic ground has a long record of producing wines that people travel to find — Etna and Santorini, but also Tokaj, Somló, the hills behind Naples, and closer to home, the Pinot Noir from the Willamette’s red volcanic hills, and Napa Cabernets grown on Howell Mountain and Atlas Peak. Different grapes, different centuries, no shared tradition between them. What they have in common is what the volcanoes left at the foot of the vines. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And in the glass a living memory of inimitable fragrance and soft fire.
It’s such a privilege to share these wines with you. These discoveries never grow old. Thank you for joining the journey with us!
Cheers,
P. + E. Mullins
2024 Bodega Hermanos Mesa Locartas Blanco
Valle de Güímar, Tenerife, Canary Islands
The Mesa family has farmed this corner of Tenerife since just after the Second World War. The winery is in the hands of the third generation now — siblings Fernando, Tomás, and Carmen. Locartas takes its name from the family’s original parcel, the plot the whole operation grew out of, though the wine draws on eight to twelve sites scattered across the valley. This is their vino de pueblo, the village wine, what the place tastes like on an ordinary day.
The vines run up the eastern slopes below Teide, from 1,000 to 3,300 feet. The soil is jable, a pale porous ash and pumice sand with pockets of clay that hold what little moisture arrives. Farming is organic, which out here is less a commitment than a description; there is not much to spray for when the ground already does the work of stressing the vine.
These vines grow on their own roots, which is rare. Phylloxera cannot travel through loose volcanic sand, so it never reached the Canaries, and the vines here were never grafted onto American rootstock the way nearly every vine in Europe was.
The grape is old-vine Listán Blanco — the same variety Andalusia calls Palomino and turns into Sherry — with a whisper of Albillo Criollo. Native yeast, stainless fermentation, six months resting mostly in steel with a little neutral French oak. Restrained winemaking, deliberately. Canary whites have built a recent reputation on struck-match swagger, showy and a little polarizing. This is not that.
A super pale bright yellow in the glass. Apricot and fresh almond come first on the nose, then stone fruit, tarragon, citrus zest, and something flinty underneath. The texture is what grabs you first. Like silk with a nice acidity that lifts it. It finishes bone dry. It is savory and mouth-watering, with a fine grippy texture and a gentle bite at the finish.
At the table: Oysters, tinned fish on crackers, grilled octopus — anything off the grill that came out of the sea.
Garalis Retsina
Limnos, Greece
Manolis Garalis is a third-generation grower. His family arrived on Limnos in 1922, refugees from Reis-Dere resettled in the village of Agios Dimitrios and given land to farm. For decades they grew grapes and sold them to the island’s cooperative. Manolis broke off in 2007 to make his own wine and works five hectares of certified organic vineyard with his wife Maria and their children.
The grape is Muscat of Alexandria, which came to Limnos about a century ago with Greek families returning from Egypt. It ferments in stainless steel with fresh Aleppo pine resin worked in—the same method Greeks used three thousand years ago, when resin wasn’t a style but simply how you kept wine from spoiling. The vines grow in volcanic sand with pockets of limestone, under near-constant Aegean wind.
A light golden, almost lemon yellow. Pat’s take on the aromas: “like sitting in a pine forest drinking a lemon/lime Gatorade.” We all definitely got dried orange citrus and rosemary, then comes the piney resin, present but not aggressive, and a little honey behind it. The palate is bizarrely refreshing, not viscous at all. It’s savory, with a medium-plus body, lively acidity, and a long herbal finish. The resin reads more like an herb garden than a pine forest.
At the table: We drank this last week with lamb ribs and lamb sausage off the grill, tzatziki, escarole with lemon and garlic and Greek oregano, heirloom tomatoes in olive oil, and a cucumber and pepperoncini salad with feta and kalamata olives. It handled all of it. The acidity cuts the fat on the ribs, the resin finds the oregano and the lemon and sits right down next to them, and the wine is cold and bright enough that you keep going back to it between bites.
Serve very cold.
2023 Murgo Etna Rosso
Sicily, Italy
The Scammacca del Murgo family has been farming the eastern slopes of Etna, in the town of Santa Venerina, for more than a century and a half — one of the oldest winemaking clans on the mountain, older even than many of the Nerello Mascalese vines they tend.For generations, that meant olives, citrus, jams. Baron Emanuele Scammacca del Murgo turned the estate into a proper winery, hand-labeling their first bottle in 1981 from the 1980 vintage. Today the estate is run by the next generation, eight siblings deep, still working the same volcanic ground.
This Etna Rosso comes entirely from Nerello Mascalese, hand-harvested from vines more than thirty years old, planted in the loose, mineral-driven volcanic soils that define the mountain’s eastern face. Murgo keeps it simple in the cellar, fermented and aged only in stainless steel, no oak, so nothing stands between the grape and the lava underneath it.
What makes Nerello Mascalese unlike almost any other red is how little it looks like what it tastes like. It pours pale, almost translucent, closer to a Barbaresco or a good Burgundy than anything you’d expect from a grape grown at the foot of an active volcano. But the structure and the savoriness are all Etna.
In the glass, it is a cherry red, closer to garnet at the edge. Aromas of wet stone and red berry fruit meet you. The palate is lean to medium-bodied, with fine, polished tannins and bright red berry fruit. Its elegant, almost weightless body keeps you reaching for more, finishing clean, savory, and stony with just a whisper of tannins.
At the table: If you have never had a Nerello Mascalese, prepare to be smitten. It is one of the most versatile reds we know — the acidity and the fine tannin let it sit down next to almost anything without taking over. We grilled thick-cut veal chops and poured it at a special family dinner last week, which may be the best thing we have done with a bottle this year. It also loves roast chicken with mushrooms, slow-grilled pork shoulder with fennel, and anything built on lentils. Serve it cool, closer to cellar temperature than room.
