“Let me show you a house built five centuries before Christ.” I let out a chuckle at the nonchalance of my tour guide’s unironic directive. Five centuries! Before Christ! But this is Menorca, where you can rendezvous with the ancient world after a pintxo picnic beneath a wild olive tree. Another thing you can do in Menorca: drink local wine, which is precisely why I traveled to the Balearic island this past April. Unlike other Mediterranean destinations praised for their wine scenes (Catalonia, Sicily, Provence), Menorca has kept out of the spotlight. But I’d wager that’s about to change.
To understand wine’s context in Menorcan culture, you have to rewind a bit (a couple thousand years, give or take). “When we speak about wine in Menorca, we are not only speaking about a drink,” Menorca Discovery owner Gonzalo Lopez tells me. Trade, agriculture, travel, and celebration are all part of wine’s timeline on the island. He offers an example connected to the Balearic Slingers. These ‘slingers’ were mercenaries for Carthaginian and later Roman armies who were capable of hurling stones over 100 miles per hour. “There are historical references suggesting that these warriors were paid with coins, but that they spent their earnings on wine,” Lopez says. Over time, the story evolved that they ditched the coins and simply opted for payment in wine. “Whether taken literally or as a reflection of ancient habits, it says a lot about how important wine already was in Mediterranean life.”
Photo: Andrew Ling
Archaeology also telegraphs wine’s story on the island, Lopez continues. “Amphora fragments found in prehistoric and Roman sites, as well as amphoras recovered from shipwrecks show how Menorca was connected to ancient wine trade routes.” Wine was arriving from places such as Campania, Catalonia, and throughout the western Mediterranean. As time passed, it became further ingrained in local life. “For centuries, many families had small vineyards, and wine formed part of the rural landscape of the island,” Lopez says. This all came to a screeching halt with the arrival of phylloxera—a microscopic pest that infamously wiped out around two-thirds of the world’s vineyards between the 1860s and 1890s (accidentally brought over by, sigh, North America).
Menorca’s recovery from phylloxera has been slow but steady, gaining notable traction in recent decades. “Today, wine is becoming once again part of the island’s gastronomic identity, together with cheese, olive oil, and other local products,” Lopez explains. The volume is much smaller compared to other Mediterranean wine regions, but Lopez suggests it’s moved in a direction that’s more professional and quality-focused. “Menorca cannot compete with large wine regions in quantity, and it should not try to,” he says. “The strength of Menorcan wine is precisely its limited production, its character, and its connection to a very specific landscape.”
This distinct landscape that Lopez refers to is designated as a Biosphere Reserve. This was made possible, I’m told, by an unlikely source: the Franco dictatorship. Menorca was one of the last Republican holdouts of the Spanish Civil War, and as punishment, Franco kept the island under tight military control, starving it of the development that would eventually transform its neighbors into mass tourism destinations. The end result for Menorca? A spectacularly unspoiled habitat. And thankfully, the rising generation of wine producers on Menorca is determined to keep it that way.
