El Grifo winery, Lanzarote
Visiting the oldest vines I've ever seen.
The vines in Lanzarote were never touched by the blight of Phylloxera. It seems the black, scorched soil was no home for the tiny aphid-like creatures, so while they wreaked near-total destruction on vineyards across Europe, the grapes in Lanzarote continued to grow. At El Grifo winery in San Bartolomé in the centre of the island, some vines are more than 250 years old.
That’s not to say that Lanzarote hasn’t had its own share of destruction. In the 1700s, six years of volcanic eruptions ruined much of the island’s fertile agricultural land—detailed reports of the eruptions by a local priest talk of vast rivers of lava, explosions, tremors, and fire. After this, there were no more cereal crops, and cattle pastures were replaced by free-roaming herds of hardy goats. Unlike other crops, vines don’t needs fertile green land to succeed. Vines that caught fire or were overcome by falling tephra were simply re-planted, to become Lanzarote’s thriving wine industry.
El Grifo winery pays close attention to the adjacency of volcanic violence to its calm and beautiful vineyard, choosing to leave large spaces of Pāhoehoe1 lava flow as part of its landscaping, connecting the gardens and courtyards to the wild, barren lands of the Timanfiya National Park just outside the perimeter wall—the epicentre of Lazarote’s most catastrophic volcanic activity in human memory.
We’d come to El Grifo for the wine, so after spending a long time touching old volcanic rocks, I let myself be dragged inside the winery museum. El Grifo is the oldest winery in the Canary islands, established in 1775, but it’s proud of its innovation rather than its history alone. In the 1970s, they were the first winery to install stainless steel equipment in the Canaries, and were also among the first to install generators to power the winery with electricity. In the 1980s, the winery was renovated, turning the old equipment and storage rooms into the vineyard museum, much of it designed by local artist and architect César Manrique.
Before stainless steel at El Grifo, there was stone and tile. Each fermentation vessel was lined with local ceramic tiles, with a porthole, and a slim wooden ladder to climb into from the top—I’d like to think this was made by their in-house cooper, but I can’t confirm that, so believe it if you like. You can walk between the vessels now, each of them is twice my height, and many, many litres large. They’re impressive things, at once showing ingenuity and also giving off ideas of saunas and Jacuzzis thanks to the pearl-grey tilework.
Malvasía Volcánica is indigenous to Lanzarote. It’s a pale, high acid white grape, that seemingly grows from nothing—the pitted black land of Lanzarote is planted up with single scraggly stems of unruly Malvasía, sheltered from the constant winds by pumice dry stone walls, growing loose along the ground in a bush vine-style scenario. These pits are dug to reach better soil, we are told, rather than to provide extra shelter. This makes sense. The soil on top is nothing but ash and chippings, hot from the sun, and the vines surely need all the cool blasts of breeze they can get out here.
El Grifo’s Malvasía Volcánica Lías uses battonage and old French oak, something many other Lanzarote white wines would not. On the island, fresh, high acid whites that taste of the sea are the most popular—what goes better with calamari and fried boquerones than a wine that feels like squeezing a lemon straight into your mouth?
Lías is different. From its aroma you can tell—there is fresh bread dough, and light, buttery caramel, and a spike or petrichor, something I was incredibly surprised to find here. The complexity of its aroma translated into a wonderfully structured and balanced wine, two words I used to find boring when I was bang into hyped natural wines. Lías is a perfect example of why balance is not dull—each mouthful is an elegant competition between the silky lees-laid mouthfeel like sun on your back, the prickly acid and fleshy apple-peach-aloe vera juiciness like biting into a cartoon cactus, and the lingering afternotes of Brazil nuts and salt. An incredible find, and one of my wines of the year.
I also tried El Grifo’s Saramago 100, a rare Syrah of only 12,986 bottles from the 2022 harvest. Saramago is actually named to commemorate what would have been José Saramago’s 100th birthday. José Saramago, who moved to Lanzarote later in life after the controversy surrounding his book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, and became friends with the El Grifo family and team—his library is housed in the heart of the vineyard.
The Syrah vines on the estate are among El Grifo’s oldest, and I’ve not had many experiences with very old vines. The intensity of that Syrah is something I’ll never forget—such an intensity of blackcurrant and blackberries, but with a clarity and shape I couldn’t believe. The structure of the wine in my mouth, its smooth, silken tannins and ripe, black fruits, flung images of onyx pyramids and multi-faceted jewels into my mind, and I was tracing each surface with the tip of my tongue. I love a Syrah, a deep, dark, sultry Syrah, when it feels bold enough to be spooky. This had the Gothic confidence to litter the floor with fallen leaves, to trail a calligraphic curl of smoke along the rim of the glass, to talk about the darkness of deep French forests in the heart of a Volcanic desert. A special lightness of touch shows Lanzarote’s tannin-lite approach to winemaking, and this highlighted more of the fruit elements of this special wine. As of this moment, I can’t find any to buy online. I’m heartbroken.
Pāhoehoe is a Hawaiian word, used to describe Basaltic lava flows that are smooth, billowing, and ropey in texture. It comes from the word “hoe” meaning “to paddle”, because of the lava’s resemblance to water moving around an oar or rudder.