The wine was here first
The harbour master in Shanghai
First generation: Hans Gustav Myhre senior.
The story does not begin on Lanzarote, and not with wine. It begins in Shanghai, where he arrived in 1888. Thirty years later he was the city’s harbour master, from 1918 to 1923.
We mention it because it says something about where the family’s habits come from. Travel far. Stay long. Learn a place from the inside instead of looking at it from outside. It is not an efficient way to live. It is only the one that works.
Erik Myhre opens the travel agency
Second generation: Erik Myhre, son of the harbour master.
In 1952 he founded the family travel agency. That is where the family trade really began: knowing where people ought to go, and why. He did not inherit a harbour, but a disposition — travel far, see for yourself, trust your instinct.
A travel agency then was not a search box. It was a person who had been there, who knew the hotel owner by name, and who would pick up the telephone if something was not good enough. That way of working has followed the family ever since. Into wine as well.
His son finds Lanzarote
Third generation: Hans Gustav Myhre, named after his grandfather, son of Erik.
In 1967 he came to Lanzarote. It was raining — rare for the island, less rare for a Norwegian.
Within a day he had bought two holiday houses and a two-hectare plot in a place almost nobody had heard of. He was not on holiday. He had seen something, and he was not the type to sleep on it.
That same year his father’s agency sent the first Norwegian travellers there. 1967 is the year in our logo, and where the connection to the island begins — nearly two hundred years after El Grifo bottled its first vintage. We were, to put it kindly, late.
Three developments in black sand
Hans Gustav was behind three developments on the island: Club del Mar, Eldorado and Panorama. White terraces set straight into the lava, at a time when Lanzarote was barely on the map for Norwegians.
He and his wife Trine Lise kept a place of their own and lived there for the rest of their lives. It is that place that has kept the family on the island ever since — and the reason we do not arrive there as guests.
Recognition
The work was noticed outside the family. Hans Gustav received an award from the Spanish ministry of industry and tourism for what he had built on the island.
He was also early to automate the work of travel, in a trade still writing tickets by hand. In December 1985 he stood in Punta del Este explaining why. The rest of the trade took a decade to catch up.
Three poles, three flags. Norwegian, Spanish, and the hotel’s own.
As it was before everyone else came
The photographs in the family archive were taken before Lanzarote became a destination. They show an island living off the sea and off the little that could be grown: fishing boats pulled up on black stone, work in the fields with hands down in the ash, steam standing straight up out of the ground.
None of them was taken to be shown. That is probably why they hold up.
It is the same ground the wines come from today. Which is why they hang here, and not only on a page about wine.
Every vine has its own pit, and its own crescent of stone.
Monica and Henrik
Fourth generation. Monica and Henrik met in 2007. Both designers, both with a weakness for places that resemble nothing else.
Lanzarote came with the family, but over the years they began to look at the island with slightly different eyes than those who come for the week. Not the pool and the beach, but the ground. The walls. Why the houses stand the way they do, why the vines stand one by one, who built what and why.
It was sixteen years before either of them said the word wine out loud. But the interest had been building long before it had a name — which is why Monrik Wines is not something that appeared in 2023. It is something that was finished then.
A change of generation
When Hans Gustav died in 2011, a quiet handover began. Six years later Trine Lise died, and it fell to us to carry the place on.
What came with the handover in 2017 was a house full of history, and a duty to look after what was already there. We changed nothing that first year. We got to know the place as it was, and slowly began to leave our own mark on it.
We have gone on developing the property since — and our own relationship with the island with it.
The interest finds a direction
Wine had always been part of the island for us. In 2023 it began to take a different place.
We read more, asked more, tasted more deliberately. We began to understand why Malvasía Volcánica tastes the way it does, why the vines stand one by one, and why so little of the wine ever leaves Lanzarote.
There was no plan to become an importer. It was an interest finding a direction.
Early in 2024 Henrik was back at a winery he had visited several times before. He bought a case and started driving home. A little way down the road, the thought came.
More than fifty years earlier his family had helped introduce Lanzarote to Norway. What if the next generation could do it again — this time through wine?
He turned the car around, drove back and asked the question that became the beginning of Monrik Wines.
“What if we reintroduced Lanzarote to Norway — this time through wine?”
They needed no importer. What they make is drunk on the island, and the little left over goes to a few addresses in the United States and Japan. That we were nonetheless received the way we were probably owes something to several of the older owners knowing the name already.
Finding the right wineries
What followed was a year of gravel roads, vineyards, long conversations and rather more bottles than strictly necessary.
We were not after as many as possible. Quite the opposite. We wanted to find people and wineries with a character of their own — places where the history, the ground and the craft hang together, and where you can understand why the wine turned out exactly as it did.
The welcome was warmer than we had dared hope for. There was a fine humility towards the history we arrived with, and a mutual respect that meant the conversations quickly came to be about far more than bottles and prices.
We took our time. We got to know the people behind the wines, listened, tasted and came again. There were good meetings, long conversations, and a sense of having met people who shared the same respect for the island and for what makes it what it is.
We were not there to collect as many producers as possible. We were there to find the right ones.
In time it became clear which wineries we wanted to build on. The ones we chose became the beginning of Monrik as it stands today.
It was an unusually fine time. And perhaps that was exactly when we understood that this could become more than an idea.
Everything in place
2026 is the year it all arrives at once, the way things tend to when you have spent two years arranging them.
Althay Viticultores 2024 and El Grifo Lías 2023 entered Vinmonopolet’s standard range this summer. For the first time, wine from Lanzarote can be ordered anywhere in Norway — not only by those who already know exactly what to ask for.
In September, Monrik Evenings opened in our showroom, with room for twelve around one table.
And this site is the third. Three ways to meet the same island: a bottle from Vinmonopolet, an evening with us, or an hour with this story.
It stands for nothing but the two of us
Monrik is Monica and Henrik put together. No deeper story than that. Both of us are designers, but that is another story.
Today a dedicated team stands behind it. Two of us are pictured below.
