![]() Some vineyards, including El Grifo, have experimented with parallel shelter walls to edge yields up, but harvest remains by hand and takes place in July: earlier than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere. But the exceptionally dry climate, says Torelli, has kept the island vines free of the phylloxera pest, meaning the old varieties can be grown at ground level without grafting or other intervention. The fruit is small and yields are only about a tenth of what would be expected in mainland Spain. The main grape varieties grown on El Grifo’s 65 hectares include Malvasía Volcánica, and Moscatel, from Crete. This combination of hot weather and high acidity is why our white wine is so special.” “But the wind off the Atlantic brings humidity and better acidity to the grapes. “We have a sub-tropical climate and it only rains on 20 days a year,” says Torelli, a former sommelier from Piedmont, Italy. It turned out that not only did the walls protect the vines from the wind, but condensation from the Atlantic winds would settle overnight and seep down into the picón, where it was retained and slowly found its way down to the roots of the vines. Standing in a pit in the lava, in the shade of a 240-year-old vine, Luca Torelli, a manager at El Grifo, describes how good fortune came to smile upon the farmers who strove to bring their devastated land back into production. ![]() Today it is owned and run by brothers Fermín and Juan José, the fifth generation of the Otamendi family, who acquired the vineyard in the 19th century. One such vineyard is the family-run El Grifo, founded in 1775, not much more than 30 years after the eruption and claiming to be the oldest on the island. As the vines come into leaf in spring, each horseshoe brings a vivid splash of green to the barren acres. The legacy of a type of viticulture found nowhere else on earth is mile upon mile of jet black volcanic desert, punctuated by regularly spaced horseshoes of rough walls of lava. They used the lava lumps they excavated to build rough, shallow walls to protect the newly planted vines from the rasping north winds that can blow across the rolling plateau. So the farmers hewed deep pits in the lava, called chabocos, using hand tools and, later, dynamite. If they could dig through the lava, might it be possible once again to grow something on what had once been fields of potatoes and cereals? Perhaps vines, with their deep, searching roots? ![]() Those islanders who had not fled knew that beneath the new rock was fertile alluvial clay soil. On the once-fertile high plain of La Geria, the impermeable lava was two metres deep and, in time, it also became covered in tiny fragments of black windblown volcanic dust, or picón. ![]() But on the northernmost Canary Island of Lanzarote, nearly 300 years ago, the Timanfaya volcano began a terrifying series of eruptions that would last the best part of six years and cover a third of the best farmland in thick lava. ![]()
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