“But, i' faith, you have drunk too much canaries, and
that’s a marvellous searching wine, and it perfumes the
blood”
–Shakespeare, Henry IV

El Hierro is the smallest island of the Canary Islands, and it is the wildest. Its topography has something of the savage—the dark volcanic stone rising in chiseled crags out from the Atlantic. Only 167 hectares of vines are on the island, yet it can say that it has the greatest genetic diversity of grapes in the island chain. (It is also fully powered by renewable energy)! These conditions are what convinced Rayco Fernández that El Hierro, of all the islands, had the brightest future. Bimbache is the winery Fernández created. He started with 5 hectares in 2018 spread among the three municipalities: Valverde, Frontera, and El Pinar. The vines are planted in terraces hewn into the black volcanic walls and hoyos, or small craters, dug into the rocky soils surrounded by short walls of lava stone to protect the vines from the trade winds. The vines are old and they farm them organically. All harvests are manual and the fermentations spontaneous with the only temperature control being the winery orientation to catch the wind that almost never stops blowing.

Chivo comes from a tiny 20-year-old vineyard planted close to the Atlantic in Sabinosa. On the windward side of El Hierro, this site is exposed and barren, the winds never stop blowing. All moisture at the site trickles down as groundwater from the higher elevations of Pico de Malpaso. The grapes are a blend of verijadiego blanco, bremajuelo, gual (boal), malvasía, and moscatel. The vineyard is all of 200 meters away from the sea, so close that the grapes have salt on their skins. The bunches are whole-cluster pressed and spontaneous fermentation takes place in stainless steel and it rests on the lees for nine months. The wine is all crushed stone and sea breeze, white flowers and lemon. A perfect introduction to the winery.