Lanzarote is the strangest looking vineyard in Europe. In the 1730s a six year eruption buried a third of the island under black lapilli, and the growers who came back learned to dig pits two or three metres wide down through the ash to the soil below, plant a single vine in each, and build a low horseshoe wall of stone around it to break the wind. The result, in La Geria, is thousands of craters spread across a black plain.

The ash does the work of rain: it absorbs the night dew and passes it down to the roots, in a place that gets almost no rainfall at all. The vines are ungrafted, since phylloxera never reached the island, and cover around 1,900 hectares. Malvasía Volcánica is the main grape and gives a dry white with a smoky, mineral character and a faint note of apricot, along with the sweet Malvasía the island has exported for centuries. Listán Negro makes the reds.