Do you miss Burgundy?

Love Burgundy but find the interesting stuff incinerates your credit card? Taganan 2020 could well be a wine for you!

Taganan 2020 is made by the wine collective Envinate’s Canary Islands’ outpost. It is made from plots dotted around Tenerife and is mostly made from Listán Negro and Negramoll with at least seven other (red, pink and white) varietals filling out the blend.

“Tenerife?”, you must be thinking, “Must be hellishly hot and boozy!”. No, most vine parcels on Tenerife are planted at reasonably high altitudes and close to the chilly Atlantic.

Moreover, all the vineyards on Tenerife are planted on volcanic soil. This has no infusion of organic material-goodness that the vines could turn to sugar.

Taganan 2020’s turangawaewae forces it to rely on photosynthesis and whatever metamorphic weirdness it can get from the volcanic soil to feed the vines’ grape production. Consequently, Taganan 2020 clocks in at a delightful 12% booze.

So you see that the terroir of Taganan 2020 draws it to be a wine light in alcohol. To see what other effects it has, we had better scrape that sodding wax off and taste it!

Let’s pop, Batman!

Taganan 2020, Envinate

Taganan 2020 has a good colour! And by that, I mean it does not look faulty. Unless you think a wine you are about to try is faulty, and the colour supports that hypothesis, reporting on the colour of a wine is generally pointless. Knowing wine colours can help blind tasting, but you should not blind taste on the basis of someone else’s note.

The nose has delicious, sweet cherry fruit, rounded out with lovely strawberry aromas and a hint of vivacious redcurrant. The fruit, if nothing else, would make one lean toward beginning to think it had the suggestion of the shades of a hint of Burgundian character.

Then there is the effect of the soil-type Taganan 2020 is grown on. Here things move from Burgundy to Hades!

Taganan has suggestions of brimstone, black pepper and black powder to it. It Is sulphury, but in a very slightly reductive manner.

So, I will give the Taganan 2020 a vigorous swirl in my glass. Good, the sulphur retreats, but never quite disappears. That is fine; you do not want a wine to be totally inexpressive of its tarangawaewae.

What emerges on the nose of the Taganan 2020 is a rich earthiness. A rocky and stoney earthiness, but earthy in a way not entirely dissimilar to the way some red Burgundies can be earthy.

So Taganan has good, fresh red fruit, a rich earthiness and is quite elegant. That sounds pretty Burgundian to me!

Of course, Taganan 2020 is far from a clone of Burgundy, very far indeed. However, if only two red wines existed in the world, Screaming Eagle and Domaine Dujac Clos de la Roche, it would be the ‘Dujac’ that you were thinking smelled a little odd today.

Taganan’s palate is charged with lovely, sweet, ripe fruit! Yummy, yummy! Cherries and strawberries, mainly, but there is extra energy given to the palate by some tart redcurrant flavours and spiced vigour.

Indeed, Taganan 2020 has a very energetic and lively palate, with bright, fresh flavours giving vivacity and drive and a good, silky tannic structure. It is quite dry and savoury as well.

That dryness is, in part, driven by the merest hint of an ‘Australian caught on camera ball tampering’-character to the tannins, but mostly they are elegant and silky and the sandpaper roughness is only a slight hint.

And that slight hint of roughness is an expression of the Taganan 2020 terroir. There is a tumbling of metamorphic minerals and stone rolling across your palate as you tease apart the other flavours. Good! We want wines to speak of their origins!

All of these characteristics are wrapped up in a neat, elegant little package that is very light and extremely refreshing. It is both savoury and fruity. It is energetic with moderate silky tannins. It is… Burgundy?

No! Of course Taganan 2020 is not Burgundy! But, as I intimated at the beginning, if you can no longer afford the real thing, this might scratch the itch. Wonderful.

Taganan 2020 is a real bargain at £32 a pop from Vincognito.