The colour is medium garnet. On the nose cherries, chocolate and wood. In the mouth light but intense. The aftertaste is medium long.
This red wine is made with Listán Prieto grapes under the Gran Canaria DO and matures for four months in American oak barrels.
Originating from Castile-La Mancha, the prolific grape variety Listán Prieto was described as early as 1513. Around 1540, it was brought to Mexico by Spanish Franciscan monks, where they founded several missions. It was used to make the essential mass wine. It is not certain whether this was the first European Vitis vinifera in Mexico, as the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) had already appeared there around 20 years earlier and also brought vines with him.
In 1629, the Misión grape was cultivated by Catholic missionaries in the Rio Grande Valley in southern New Mexico. This made it the first successfully cultivated European variety in North America, and for a long time the only one. Earlier attempts had failed due to phylloxera. During this period, the grape was called simply “the Mission grape”, as it was planted at each of the numerous missions established throughout the region, including Southern California.
In the middle of the 16th century, it was introduced to Peru, Chile and Argentina by Spanish colonists and was the most important grape variety there until the 19th century, when it was slowly replaced by other European varieties. In the mid-sixteenth century, Listán Prieto arrived in the Canary Islands as well.
Nowadays it is known as País in Chile, Criolla in Argentina and Mission in the USA. Despite the genetic match of the variously named grapes, enough clonal variation has occurred over the centuries of their geographical separation that the Mission grape of the Americas and the Listán Prieto grape of the Canary Islands are classified by the Vitis International Variety Catalogue as two separate grape varieties.
For this bottle I paid 12.25 EUR at Spar in Puerto Rico, Gran Canaria.