Moscatel de Alejandría

Moscatel de Alejandría — the Muscat of Alexandria — is the grape behind Lanzarote's distinctive sweet wines, planted by fourteen of the island's fifteen bodegas. Some of the oldest still-producing Moscatel vines in Spain stand at El Grifo in La Geria, set out in the 19th century and still bearing fruit two hundred years later. The grape is vinified across registers: lightly off-dry whites with the variety's signature orange-blossom aromatics, late-harvest sweet wines, and the ancient sweet styles — Canari, Moscatel de Ana, George Glas — that descend from the wines once exported to northern Europe under the catch-all name Canary sack. Like Lanzarote's other heritage vines, the Moscatel here is ungrafted, the island's Phylloxera-free isolation preserving stock that mainland Europe lost in the 19th-century phylloxera crisis.