Bodegas El Grifo

Lanzarote, Canary Islands — one of Spain’s five oldest wineries, founded 1775

D.O. Lanzarote, Canary Islands · Founded 1775 · Juan José & Fermín Otamendi

In 1775, an unnamed founder pressed grapes at a property on Lanzarote and dated the indoor wine press inscription with the year. The press still bears that date. The winery that grew up around it — Bodegas El Grifo — is one of the five oldest wineries in Spain. Forty-five years before the press was built, the Timanfaya volcano erupted across the island from 1730 to 1736 and buried a quarter of Lanzarote’s surface under fresh lava and ash, including most of the island’s best cereal-growing land.

Lanzarote’s farmers responded with one of the strangest viticultural inventions in modern winemaking: La Geria. They dug pits — hoyos — into the volcanic ash, sometimes meters deep, and planted single vines at the bottom. Around each pit they built semicircular stone walls — zocos — to shelter the vines from the trade winds. The black volcanic ash, called picón, traps morning moisture and releases it slowly back to the roots. The landscape that resulted was declared a UNESCO Protected Landscape in 1994. El Grifo’s parcels sit inside it.

La Geria & the Zoco-Pits

Manuel García Durán acquired the property in the late 1870s, and the lineage has carried through the family since. El Grifo is currently led by brothers Juan José and Fermín Otamendi Rodríguez-Bethencourt, who descend from García Durán. The winery still presses grapes at the same complex, though the original 1775 press is now museum exhibit rather than working equipment.

Why El Grifo Matters

The signature grape is Malvasía Volcánica, a Canarian clone of Malvasia that thrives only on volcanic ash. El Grifo makes it in dry, semi-sweet, and sweet styles; the Lías bottling is their dry single-vineyard flagship from old picón-planted parcels. It tastes like nothing else — citrus rind, sea salt, a faint smokiness that the volcanic substrate gives the grape and nothing else really does. A 250-year-old winery practicing a viticultural method born from natural disaster, in a UNESCO landscape, with a grape that grows nowhere else. The bottle is the conversation.

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Malvasía Volcánica

Lías Malvasía Volcánica 2018

D.O. Lanzarote, Canary Islands

Dry single-vineyard flagship from old picón-planted parcels. The Canarian Malvasia clone that grows nowhere else. Citrus rind, sea salt, a faint smokiness from the volcanic substrate.

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