“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.

Grand Cruz del Calvario surrounds the Bimbache winery. The vines are 60-years-old of vijariego blanco (diego), listán blanco, gual, babosa blanco, forastera blanca, as well as various more obscure white varieties on rocky basalt. The vineyard is a few kilometers from the ocean at 650 meters. The grapes are hand harvested and pressed whole-cluster before beginning fermentation in tank before transfer to used French oak. This wine is honey dripped over crushed volcanic stone, bright lemons and aromatic herbs, ocean light and the high, high sky.