La Geria Wine Tours: Lanzarote's Vineyards in Volcanic Ash

The eruptions of 1730 to 1736 dropped metres of lapilli, the coarse black grit the islanders call rofe or picón, across farmland that had been growing grain. It should have been the end of agriculture here. Instead somebody worked out that the grit was worth more than the soil it had buried.

Lapilli behaves like a mulch that never rots. It is porous, so the heavy night dew and the moisture the trade wind carries condense inside it and drain down to the buried soil. It is loose and pale on the inside, so it shades what lies beneath and stops the water evaporating back out. On an island that gets very little rain and has no rivers, that is an irrigation system made of gravel.

So the method is: dig down through the ash until you reach the old soil, plant one vine at the bottom, and leave the pit open so the dew keeps collecting. Then build a zoco, a low semicircular wall of dry-stacked lava blocks, on the windward side, because the same trade wind that brings the moisture will shred the leaves if nothing stops it. Thousands of pits, thousands of crescents, one vine each. It is the most labour-intensive way of growing grapes anyone has ever kept doing, and it is done this way because no other way works.

There is a second thing about La Geria that most visitors never hear, and it is the part wine people travel for. In the late nineteenth century phylloxera, an aphid that eats grape roots, destroyed most of the vineyards of Europe. The fix, still in use everywhere, was to graft European vines onto resistant American roots. Nearly every glass of wine you have ever drunk came from a grafted vine.

Phylloxera never reached the Canary Islands, and the insect does not travel well through loose volcanic grit in any case. The vines in these pits are therefore pie franco, growing on their own roots, in an unbroken line from the stock that was here before the plague. That is not a marketing line, it is a plant-health fact with a date attached, and it makes this one of a very small number of places in Europe where the vine is what it was.

The grape to ask for is Malvasía volcánica, which is the island's own variety and the one every winery here leads with. It makes a dry white with a salty edge that people either take to immediately or do not. The sweet versions are the historic style, the ones that were shipped to England for centuries, and they are the ones worth tasting even if you drink dry at home.

The two cheap ones are the two good ones, and they answer different questions. The 47 euro walk is the only listing here that puts you inside the vineyard for hours rather than minutes: 8.9 kilometres, easy to moderate, four and a half to five hours including transfers, small groups, ending on a terrace with a glass and local cheese. It starts at a winery on the Teguise to Yaiza road, and it is the one to book if you want to understand the place rather than photograph it.

The 50 euro cellar visit is the other end of the same subject. Two hours, twelve people at a time, at the winery whose founding stone is dated 1775, which makes it the oldest on the island and one of the oldest in Spain. You walk through century-old pits, see the original press in what is now a wine museum, and taste. It is in English only, and it does not include transport, so it needs a car or a taxi.

The 65 euro coach passes through La Geria on its way between Timanfaya and El Golfo, and passing through is the honest description. The two trips above a hundred euros are good days out with wine attached, an e-bike circuit and a small-group south route with a brunch, but the wine is a component rather than the subject. If the vineyards are the reason you are going, spending 129 euros instead of 47 buys you less time among the vines, not more.

La Geria sits between San Bartolomé and Yaiza on the LZ-30, twenty minutes from Arrecife and about half an hour from the southern resorts. Most of the wineries are strung directly along that road with their own car parks and their own tasting rooms, so a self-drive morning is entirely possible and costs nothing beyond what you drink. The obvious problem is that you are driving, which is the single best argument for the guided walk: somebody else takes the wheel and the tasting is at the end rather than in the middle.

Two smaller points. Tastings are cheap here by mainland standards, and buying a bottle at the cellar is usually cheaper than the same bottle in a supermarket in Puerto del Carmen. And nobody under eighteen is served, which the operators state plainly; children are welcome on the walk and in the cellars, they just get the tour without the glass.

There is no season worth planning around, which is unusual for wine country. The pits, the walls and the black ground look the same in February as in October, and Lanzarote's temperature barely moves. The one date that changes what you see is the harvest, which here begins in July and is among the earliest in the northern hemisphere, so late July and August are the weeks when there are people and baskets among the vines rather than just vines.