“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.

Bimbache Tinto comes from the sunny, arid, southern part of El Hierro. The soils are mixed volcanic sands and ash and clay. Some of the vines are over a century old at an average of 800 meters. Dozens of varieties are in the cuvée but the majority is listán negro with small amounts of vijariego negro and listán prieto. The wine is hand harvested followed by spontaneous fermentation and then it ages in tank before being bottled unfined and unfiltered.