1880 Facts about Port and Madeira by Henry Vizetelly

The Wines of Tenerife.

207"

white grape,the bunches seldom exceeding a pound and a half in weight. There is also a black variety of the vidneno,but this is very rare,and is mainly grown inthe valley of Orotava. Before the oidium appeared,the malvasia vine,from which it is supposed the famed Canary sack used to be made,was also largely culti vated, but the disease dealt most severely with this variety, and now it is met with in very few vineyards. The grape is at once sweetish and harsh to the palate, while the mosto it yields is- much stronger than that from the vidneno. Tradition in Tenerife declares that the original Canary sack was a sweet and not a dry wine, as those who derive"sack" from the French word"sec" would have us believe. The malvasia grapes were left on the vines tiU they had become raisins, and one pipe of this especial vintage needed as many grapes as sufficed for five pipes of ordinary wine,so that the liquor which Howell eulogises was,in fact, nothing less than a luscious Malmsey. Other vines but scantily cultivated in the island are the tentiUo and the negra molle, both black varieties, as their names imply; the black and white muscatel; the espanola, the verdelho,the pedro- Jimenez, the forastero, the vijariega, and the gual, aU white grapes,and the last—principally found at Sauzal and Victoria— yielding a wine of great volume and alcoholic strength, but needing to be kept for many years to rid it of its natural harsh ness, and render it at all palatable. Tenerife wine, which is brought to Santa Cruz in the spring following the vintage, was realising the growers as much as ^810 per pipe at the time- we visited the island. The two principal wine-shipping firms of Tenerife are both- English houses of old standing—Messrs.Hamilton and Co. and Messrs. Davidson and Co.—and both, moreover, have their central establishments on the Marina, overlooking the bay of Santa Cruz. The house occupied by the former firm, though built early in the present century, has a very ancient look, with its spacious interior courtyard, girt round with picturesque black wooden galleries, the pillars and balustrades of which are finely turned or carved. To the right is a long narrow bodega, where