When the eruptions of the 1730s buried a quarter of Lanzarote under lava and ash, they also buried its best farmland. What the farmers did next is the reason a whole valley is now protected, painted, photographed and drunk around the world.
They noticed something. The layer of black volcanic gravel — picón, or rofe — that had ruined their fields did something remarkable: it absorbed the night dew and held it, and it stopped the little rain there was from evaporating. It was, by accident, an irrigation system. So they dug. Thousands of funnel-shaped hollows, each one to three metres wide, down through the ash to the old soil below. In the bottom of each one, a single vine. Around each one, a low semicircular wall of dry stone — a zoco — to break the wind.
The result is La Geria: a valley of black craters, each with its green tuft of vine, marching up the slopes in a pattern that looks less like agriculture than like land art. Not a drop of it is irrigated. Every plant is worked by hand, because no machine can enter a hollow. It is agriculture as endurance, and it produces perhaps eight to twelve hundred kilos per hectare where a mainland vineyard might produce ten times that.
The grape that made the island's name is Malvasía Volcánica, and Lanzarote wines carry their own protected designation of origin. The whites are dry, taut and faintly saline, with a mineral edge that people who like them describe as "volcanic" and cannot really describe otherwise. There are reds from Listán Negro, rosés, sparkling wines, and sweet Malvasías in the old style — the ones that made Canary wine famous in Shakespeare's England.
Harvest here is early, often beginning in July: one of the first in Europe, in a place where grapes ripen fast under an African sun. Most bodegas along the LZ-30 road open their doors to visitors, and a tasting usually comes with the view, which is half the point.
Drink it cold, with fish or with goat's cheese, and look at the ground while you do. Everything in the glass came out of that.