EL SOCO

The vine in the photograph is growing in a place that has no soil, no rain and a wind that would flatten it in a week. It is alive because somebody dug a pit into volcanic ash, built a half-moon of black stone on the windward side, and waited. That somebody was a farmer in La Geria three hundred years ago, and the wall he built has a name: the zoco. The shelter it makes has another: the soco.

We are borrowing the second word for a company because it says the whole idea in two syllables. We buy the ground nobody else wanted — a ruined finca in a lava field — and we build a soco for people: a wall, a court, a pool, a table, four doors. Nothing on the plot is decorative. The lapilli is the garden, the lava wall is the fence, and the volcano is the view.

This magazine is the brand, printed. It is written for the person writing a cheque and the person carrying the stone, and it does not pretend the two want the same first sentence. What they share is the last one: on this island, the ruin is the licence, and the wind is the reason for everything.

Dig. A pit into the picón, one to three metres deep, until the old soil shows. The black gravel above it is not soil; it is a blanket. It traps the night dew and gives it back to the roots by day, which is how an island with no rain became a wine island.

Build. On the side the alisio comes from — north-north-east, almost always — a crescent of lava stone, laid dry, one to one and a half metres high. Geometry does the work, not mortar: the wall stands by shape, and the wind lifts over it and leaves the pit alone.

Wait. Malvasía takes the shelter and the dew and the black heat and makes a wine nobody expected. The estate is the same drawing at a larger scale: the pit is the plateau, the wall is the compound, the vine is you, and the wine is whatever a week with no street light does to a person.