El Grifo Winery: Inside Lanzarote's 1775 Bodega

Six years of eruptions between 1730 and 1736 buried Lanzarote's farmland in ash. Where the lava ran, the land was gone for good; where the ash fell, farmers dug down through it and got their fields back. Out of that recovery came the hollow-and-wall vineyards of La Geria, and out of those vineyards came a winery whose covered wine press carries a date carved into it: 1775. That is the verifiable origin of El Grifo, and it is a better story than the myth that surrounds the place.

This guide covers what El Grifo actually is, where it sits on the island, what each visit format costs today, what you see in the wine museum, which wines have been winning medals in 2026, and how to fold a visit into a wider La Geria day. One warning up front about the name itself: in Spanish, "el grifo" on its own means the tap, as in the faucet on a sink. Search for it unqualified and you will find plumbing supplies. The winery is always "Bodega El Grifo" or "El Grifo winery", and this site uses it that way throughout.

What Is El Grifo Winery?

El Grifo is a family-owned winery in San Bartolomé, Lanzarote, founded in 1775 according to the foundational inscription on its own covered wine press, a date the winery's own history page treats as physical evidence rather than marketing. It describes itself as one of the ten oldest wineries in Spain, a claim made in exactly those words on its English pages, and it has operated continuously through three successive owning families.

The ownership trail is documented on the winery's own history page: the Ribera family, then the De Castro family, and since 1880 the descendants of Manuel García Durán. The same page records that wines from 1881 are still held in the winery's stock, from the year Don Manuel García Durán ran the place, and that 19th-century Moscatel vines still stand on the estate. Not many wineries anywhere can point at a living vine and a bottle that predate the phylloxera disaster that reshaped European viticulture.

One claim you will read about El Grifo is wrong, and it matters that you know why. Plenty of third-party pages call El Grifo "the oldest winery in the Canary Islands". The winery's own site never says that. It says "one of the ten oldest wineries in Spain", twice, and dates itself to 1775 via the press inscription. No heritage register, official body or independent wine-history source supports the Canaries superlative. A winery confident enough to carve its founding date into its own equipment does not need a borrowed superlative, and you should treat any page repeating it with caution.

El Grifo also holds a genuine distinction that is fresher than any age debate: it received the Canary Islands Tourism Award for Tourist Excellence 2025 from the Gobierno de Canarias, with the Cabildo de Lanzarote publicly congratulating it. That is a wine-tourism award, not a wine award, and it says something concrete about how the visit is run. The winery closed its 250th anniversary year on 31 October 2025 with an official visit by the Spanish Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, an event recorded on its own anniversary page.

For the wider picture of the island's bodegas, including the ones El Grifo is most often compared against, see our Lanzarote wineries overview.

Where Is El Grifo And How Do You Get There?

El Grifo sits on the LZ-30 wine road in San Bartolomé, the municipality in the middle of Lanzarote, roughly 20 minutes by road from Arrecife and about 17 minutes from Puerto del Carmen, with every major resort on the island inside half an hour's drive. There is no pickup transport of any kind, so you arrive by hire car, taxi or an organised tour that includes the winery as a stop.

The LZ-30 is the road that runs the length of La Geria from the Monumento al Campesino junction down to Uga, and El Grifo is one of the bodegas classified in the May 2026 advance of the Plan Especial de La Geria as a structuring element of the protected landscape, alongside La Geria, Rubicón, Stratvs, Las Quemadas, Vega de Yuco, La Florida, Los Bermejos and others. In plain terms: the winery is not near the wine country, it is in it, surrounded by the ash pits and half-moon stone walls that make this valley look like nowhere else.

Distances below are routing estimates computed over OpenStreetMap data, not official published figures, and they are approximate:

One practical note if you are driving yourself: Spain's general breath-alcohol limit is 0.25 mg/l, lower than the UK's 0.35, and there is no parental-consent exception to the 18 drinking age in the Canary Islands. A tasting flight will not leave most people confidently under the limit. That is the honest, sourced reason a driven tour exists, and it is worth weighing before you plan a self-drive bodega day. Our driving the La Geria wine route guide covers the road itself in detail.

If you would rather not drive at all, these are the three formats worth a look first:

What Does A Visit To El Grifo Cost?

El Grifo publishes four visit formats: a 15 euro self-guided audio tour with a two-wine tasting, a 30 euro tasting of five selected wines, a 50 euro two-hour guided Wine Lovers tour with six wines and Canarian cheeses, and a 95 euro version with a 90-minute lunch at Restaurant Mozaga. Children up to 17 enter the audio tour free; the other three formats are adults only.

The winery's own visits page lists those prices directly, and they are the ones you will actually pay on the day. An aggregator figure of "from 9 euros" circulates online and is contradicted by the winery's own page, which lists no tour below 15 euros. If you see a cheaper number elsewhere, it is not coming from El Grifo.

The audio tour runs in Spanish, English, French, Italian and German; the guided experiences run in Spanish and English. The winery is open Monday to Friday with last entry at 17:15, and the shop stays open to 18:00. El Grifo also markets seasonal "Harvest Experiences" referenced on its visits page, though no price for those was published there, so treat them as something to ask about rather than something to budget for.

Self-Guided Audio Tour Or Guided Tasting: Which Should You Book?

For most visitors the 15 euro audio tour is the right entry point: it gets you into the wine museum and the 18th-century winery with a two-wine tasting in 45 minutes, on your own schedule and in five languages. Book a guided format instead if you want more than two wines, if you want cheese alongside them, or if two hours of context from a guide matters more to you than time flexibility.

The audio tour's quiet advantage is children: under-18s enter free, and every other format at El Grifo is adults only. Families travelling with teenagers who cannot legally taste, remember the 18 rule has no parental-consent exception in the Canaries, get the museum and the old presses without paying for a tasting they cannot join.

The guided side scales up fast. The 30 euro format is a pure 35-minute tasting of five wines with no tour attached, good for a tight schedule. The 50 euro Wine Lovers tour is the full two-hour experience, limited-group, six wines and Canarian cheeses, and it is the one most wine-interested visitors describe as the sweet spot. The 95 euro gastronomy version adds a 90-minute lunch at Restaurant Mozaga and turns the whole thing into a half-day.

A booked tour product can also handle El Grifo for you entirely. The El Grifo bodega tasting with cheese runs from $58, holds a 4.9 rating from 365 reviews, lasts two hours and is limited to 10 participants, with free cancellation as standard across the roster.

If you are weighing El Grifo against its nearest rival up the road, our head-to-head La Geria or El Grifo comparison breaks down the differences in setting, price structure and what you actually taste.

What Do You Actually See: The Wine Museum And The Old Presses

The heart of the visit is the winery's wine museum, housed in the original 18th-century buildings whose primitive facilities the winery itself describes as "an unmissable destination to understand the beginnings of winemaking in Lanzarote and the Canary Islands", including the covered wine press carrying the 1775 foundational inscription, old presses, and a library used as the source for its historic Canari and Glas wines.

This is not a museum bolted onto a modern cellar door. The 1775 press was discovered during restoration works, foundation stone and all, and the restoration that followed became the museum. The winery keeps wines from 1881 in its stock and maintains a documentary library it uses to reconstruct historic Canari and Glas wines, two styles with roots in the islands' pre-phylloxera era. You are walking through a building that has processed grapes for roughly 250 consecutive vintages.

There is a César Manrique thread here too, and it is documented by the winery about its own property: Manrique, described as a family friend, advised on the restoration that became the museum, designed the label for the winery's Malvasía Semidulce, which its history page calls his favourite wine, designed the logo and corporate emblem, and created the Monument to the Griffin Bird at the estate entrance. The griffin, a mythical eagle-lion, is where the name comes from, and the monument is the first thing you pass walking in.

Outside the museum the estate runs into the same landscape the whole region shares: vines planted one to a pit, in hollows about three metres across and two to two and a half metres deep, dug down through the volcanic ash to the buried pre-eruption soil, each shielded by a half-moon dry-stone wall facing the north-northeasterly trades. Our guide to how Lanzarote grows wine in volcanic ash explains the system in full.

Which El Grifo Wines Should You Taste, And What Has Won Medals?

The house signature is Malvasía Volcánica, the island's flagship white grape, and the bottles with the strongest recent record are the Malvasía Colección range and the El Grifo Rosado de Lágrima 2025, a Listán Negro rosé reviewed in the Spanish press in May 2026 as elegant, mineral and delicate. The winery announced two gold medals at Mundus Vini 2026, adding to a 2025 in which it took the Canary Islands Tourism Award.

The medal detail matters because it is dated and checkable. Two golds at Mundus Vini 2026, announced 1 April 2026 on the winery's own site, is a current, named competition result, not a vague "award-winning" badge. The Rosado de Lágrima review, and the 2025 golds it notes, give rosé drinkers a specific bottle to ask for at the tasting counter.

For context on the wider island, the strongest 2026 result from any Lanzarote bodega came at the Decanter World Wine Awards, where Vega de Yuco's Princesa Gara 2022, a Malvasía Volcánica aged on lees, took a Silver medal, which on Decanter's scale means 90 to 94 points. Lanzarote as a whole also took a Grand Gold at Bacchus 2026 for Timanfaya Malvasía Dulce Natural 2018. El Grifo is a heavyweight, but it is not the only bodega collecting silverware, and a tasting flight anywhere on the island this year is drawing on a vintage pool in form.

Roughly 84 per cent of what DO Lanzarote sells is white and about 98 per cent of it never leaves Spain, so if you taste something you like, the tasting counter and the winery shop, open to 18:00, are the reliable place to buy it. Our Lanzarote wine brands worth buying guide covers what travels well and what does not.

Can You Combine El Grifo With Other La Geria Wineries In One Day?

Yes, easily: El Grifo, Bodega La Geria, Rubicón, Stratvs and Los Bermejos all sit on or just off the LZ-30 corridor, close enough that a three-wineries guided tour covers them in three and a half hours with transport included, while a self-driver can realistically manage two or three stops in a half-day if each stop is kept short.

The arithmetic favours either extreme. A single-bodega visit with a proper tasting is a two-hour commitment; a multi-stop self-drive day needs a designated driver because of the 0.25 mg/l breath limit, which is exactly why the driven formats exist. The three-wineries tour runs from $105, holds a 5.0 rating from 112 reviews, lasts three and a half hours with pickup included, is capped at 8 travellers and includes a Lanzarote goat cheese tasting.

If you would rather build your own pairing of stops, our Lanzarote wine tasting guide compares formats and prices across the bodegas, and the Bodega La Geria guide covers the winery most often paired with El Grifo on a two-stop day.

When Is The Best Time To Visit El Grifo?

July is the dramatic month: the Lanzarote harvest began in the first week of July 2026, with Malvasía Volcánica traditionally first into the winery, and the Consejo Regulador forecast the crop closing above three million kilos, roughly triple 2025's 843,000 kg. For weather and crowds rather than vineyard action, spring and autumn are quieter, and the winery's anniversary events cluster around late October.

The 2026 harvest is a genuine spectacle if your dates align. Bodegas David Fernández and Jable de Tao picked first, followed by El Grifo, which sent its first pressings to its Brut sparkling. By early August around 900,000 kg had been gathered, and on 2 September 2026 the Consejo Regulador was forecasting a close above three million kilos with excellent fruit condition, described as especially encouraging after two short campaigns. Growers were paid about four euros a kilo, which is why anyone still digs these pits by hand.

Late October carries the anniversary resonance, and the island's wine calendar gives you a reason to be around in November too: the Consejo Regulador's 2026 programme runs Semana Malvasía from 2 to 8 November. For the full seasonal breakdown, see our when to visit Lanzarote wine country guide.

Is There A Budget Way To Visit El Grifo?

The cheapest direct route is the 15 euro audio tour, but the lowest-priced booked wine experience on the island is a 28 dollar chocolate-pairing vineyard tour at 4.8 from 482 reviews, and free options exist nearby: Rubicón's facilities are open free daily 10:00 to 19:00, and the Casa Museo del Campesino on the LZ-30 is free entry.

The chocolate pairing is not at El Grifo itself, but it is the same wine country, the same 1.5-hour shape, and it is flagged as likely to sell out, which at that price is not surprising. It suits travellers who want the tasting experience without the 50 euro commitment, or groups mixing drinkers and non-drinkers.

For a zero-spend taste of the landscape, the free-things angle is real: Rubicón lets you walk its facilities without paying, and the Casa Museo del Campesino, César Manrique's tribute to Lanzarote's farming knowledge with its Fecundidad sculpture, costs nothing. Our free things to do in Lanzarote wine country guide lists the rest. The honest budget answer is that the landscape itself is free; it is the tastings that cost, and 15 euros is where they start at this winery, as Lanzarote Wine Tours lays out.

Before you commit, these three formats cover the El Grifo experience from the cheapest booked option to the full multi-winery day:

El Grifo is a 1775 winery in San Bartolomé with four published visit formats from 15 to 95 euros, a wine museum built around its original 18th-century press, and a 2026 record that includes two Mundus Vini gold medals. The questions below cover the claims, prices and practical details readers ask about most, including the one superlative this site refuses to repeat.

Common Questions About El Grifo Winery