Beyond the sea
Surreal is a word you sometimes see used to describe the vineyards of the Canary Islands. And it’s true there’s something uncanny – almost nightmarish – about, say, a vineyard trained with the traditional cordon trenzado method in El Valle de la Orotava on the archipelago’s largest island of Tenerife.
Arranged horizontally just inches above the ground, the gnarled, plaited vines, many of them well over a century old, and some as much as 200 years old, seem to slither around the vineyards like entwined wooden snakes, stretching as far as 15m from the mother trunk – a sight made all the more eerie when shrouded in the mist that is such a frequent feature of this sub-tropical climate.
No less peculiar, surprising and dreamlike are the vineyards of Lanzarote, which call to mind some imagined post-apocalyptic experiment to make wine on the moon. Here the vines are dug into the thick layer of pícon volcanic ash that covers the island, each bush vine protected from the winds that blow in off the Atlantic by being planted
