2020 Puro Rofe Masdache Blanco
WINEMAKER: Carmelo Pena
REGION: Canary Islands, SP
VARIETAL: Listán Blanco, Malvasia Volcanica, Diego
VITICULTURE: Organic
Masdache is named for a small village on the southeastern edge of La Geira in Lanzarote, and it is sourced from Ascensión Robayna’s vineyard, Moro la Virgen. This site is planted with 100+-year-old Listán Blanco, Malvasía, and Diego. This vineyard is farmed organically and is harvested by hand and crushed whole-cluster in a stone lagar at Finca Mota. After a short maceration on the skins, the wine ferments by indigenous yeasts in French oak barrels and is aged on its lees in barrel for seven months before bottling.
Lanzarote lies less than 100 kilometers from Western Sahara and of all the Islands in the Canaries it feels and looks the most like an extension of the African continent. Unlike Tenerife or La Palma where a single volcano dominates the landscape, Lanzarote is composed of literally hundreds of smaller volcanoes, which have tended to erupt simultaneously in the past, creating a moonscape littered with volcanoes and craters. The last major eruption here in the 1730s blanketed the entire island with small, black, aerated pebbles, like jet black pumice, which the locals call ‘Rofe.’ It’s these pebbles that give the island its unique appearance and altered the terroir of Lanzarote so dramatically that viticulture only became possible after the 1730s eruptions. This ‘Rofe’ fittingly provides the name for our new producer here Puro Rofe, wine makers attempting the expression of Pure Volcanic stone.
Puro Rofe is a young project. The first commercially released vintage was 2018 although they made wine in ‘16 and ‘17 before fully committing to the project. It’s composed of the extremely talented young winemaker and Canary native Carmelo Pena with viticulture handled by Vicente Tower, an artist by trade but also a Lanzarote local who’s family’s vineyards provide the backbone of the Puro Rofe project. Vicente farms organically, as his family always have, and most importantly on the desert like island does not irrigate.