How Tenerife’s worst wildfires in 40 years led to one winery’s best-selling bottle
In 2023, most of Bodega Piedra Fluida’s grapes were destroyed in Tenerife’s worst wildfires in 40 years. But like a phoenix from the ashes, the winery was forced to adapt, creating what is now one of its top-selling wines. Amelie Maurice-Jones reports.
15 August 2023 was a dark day in Tenerife, as wildfires spread across the arpeggio, ravaging more than 15,000 hectares of land. Sparked by arsonists, the fires lasted two months.
“It was rough,” Bodega Piedra Fluida manager, Sofia Monshouwer, tells the drinks business. The blaze began near the winery’s Las Dehesas vineyard in the Güímar Valley, before spreading north. The results were nightmarish: “We lost the production of that year,” she adds.
While the vineyards didn’t actually burn down, most grapes absorbed ashy, burnt aromas from the smoke, meaning they couldn’t be used for production.
Light at the end of the tunnel
But this forced the winery – which harvests grapes from the highest vineyards in Europe at 1687 metres – to get creative. As the manager points out, ending the year empty-handed wasn’t an option: “Obviously to survive, we need to make wine, so we had to try to make a new wine with what we had.”
The result? Not one, but two bottles. First and foremost was Magec, a one-off cuvée blending rescued grapes from estate including fruit that would normally go into their premium bottlings, bringing together select parcels from the fire-affected north and less-impacted south.
It’s a story of resilience: it’s name ‘Magec’ refers to the sun deity in the mythology of the Guanches, the ancient Berber people who inhabited the Canary Islands.
“It is the light you see at the end of the tunnel,” explains Monshouwer. Created in troubled times, today, Magec is the Bodega’s top-seller in London, bagging a prime spot in the Wine Society’s 2025 Christmas Box.
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And its legacy continues to linger. Made from a blend of local red listán negro and white listán blanco, €1 from every bottle goes towards reforestation efforts on the island.
Freshly launched
In the wake of the wildfires, Piedra Fluida also produced a 2023 rosé – blending Listán Blanco grapes from the Los Frontones vineyard in southern Tenerife and the Tamaide area in the municipality of Santa Úrsula, in northern Tenerife.
Launched last October, Monshouwer describes a “very gastronomical” pour. Grapes are co-fermented in stainless steel tanks before being aged in French oak vats for 10 months – tapping into a growing thirst for aged, complex rosés.
Volcanic voltage
Volcanic wines are also erupting in popularity, thanks to their striking story and distinctive flavour profile. This is good news for Tenerife, where volcanic soils meet high altitude plots and diverse microclimates.
“Each year is getting better for us,” confirms Monshouwer, who founded Piedra Fluida in 2018. “The big trend for volcanic wines started with Etna. Now, it’s coming towards the Canary Islands.”
She hopes wine-lovers around the world will open their eyes to the “souls behind each wine”, with the Spanish archipelago’s vineyards steeped in history – enriched by century-old vines and indigenous grape varieties.
“They’re discovering the diversity and uniqueness of what we’ve got in the Canary Islands,” she adds.
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