Producer guide
Three corporations handle roughly half the world wine trade. None of them ends up in our range.
We buy wine from families, from collectives, from individuals who farm their own vines. Sometimes that is four hectares in the mountains, sometimes thirty in a valley. What they share: the person making the wine knows every vine. And you can taste it.
Large wineries buy grapes across several regions, blend them to a constant profile and correct acidity, aroma and tannin in the cellar. The result is technically clean. It is consistent from vintage to vintage. It tastes the same everywhere on earth. That is the whole point. A brand is not allowed to surprise you.
Small producers work the other way round. They have their plot, often for generations, with its own soil, its own microclimate, old vines. What ends up in the glass is a slice of that place in that year. Sometimes rainy and elegant, sometimes hot and compact. Drink the same grower over ten years and you taste the weather.
Industrial wine tastes like a brand. Handmade wine tastes like a place.
They know their vines. A grower with three hectares walks every vine two or three times a season. They see which parcel ripens first, which vines are struggling, where the soil is drying out. That information disappears in an industrial winery the moment grapes from thirty sites go into the same tank.
Yields are small. A vine allowed to carry only five bunches gives those bunches more concentration. Industrial producers need volume, so the vine is pushed to fifteen. You taste the difference.
They intervene less. Spontaneous fermentation with the yeasts from their own vineyard. Little or no new oak. Minimal sulphur. No fining, no filtration. That takes nerve, because plenty can go wrong. When it works, the wine has a liveliness that a corrected one never has.
They have an opinion. Industrial cellars follow market research. Small producers follow their conviction. In the glass you notice what they stand for.
Adega Algueira, Ribeira Sacra. Fernando González farms terraces with gradients up to 85 percent above the Rio Sil. Machines have no chance there, everything happens by hand, some of it on ropes. Yields per hectare are tiny and the work is brutal. In return you taste the slate of the terrace: Mencía with dark fruit and an almost salty minerality, Godello with an acidity that is more Atlantic than sun.
Coto de Gomariz, D.O. Ribeiro. Ricardo Carreiro Ameijeiras, known to everyone as Caco, rebuilt Coto de Gomariz in the 1970s after years in South America. He co-wrote the first statutes of the D.O. Ribeiro. When he died in 2008, Inma Pazos joined and has run the estate since, which stays in Carreiro family ownership. Inma works biodynamically, with spontaneous fermentation and experiments in clay amphorae and other unusual vessels. She is an oenologist and a chemist and worked in some of Spain's best wineries before coming to Gomariz.
Sangarida, Bierzo. Sangarida is the next-generation project of the Fariña family from Rías Baixas, where they run Bodega Attis. In 2019 they went to Bierzo together with oenologist Jean-François Hébrard and now work with fifty-year-old Mencía vines on the slopes of the Montes Aquilianos, beneath peaks of over 2000 metres. Spontaneous fermentation, organic farming, ageing on the lees. The Mencía has more fruit than the Ribeira Sacra version and less severity, but the same clarity. They also make Godello and Doña Blanca, two native white varieties of the region.
Aldier, Sent in the Engadin. We do not only carry wine. Aldier makes vermouth at 1440 metres in the Lower Engadin. Carlos Gross, a hotelier in Sent, started producing his own vermouth in an old bank building in 2018, to a recipe he developed himself. After his death his sons Gian and Nico carry on. Botanicals from the Engadin mountains, two versions, Bianco and Rosso, small batches. Swiss alpine vermouth that has more to do with the mountains around it than with Italian tradition.
We are not the only ones curating small producers. Envinate (four oenologists who met at university in Alicante and have made wine together since 2008, from the Ribeira Sacra to Tenerife and Almansa) or Nanclares y Prieto in the Rías Baixas (Alberto Nanclares started in his garage in Cambados in 1997, with Silvia Prieto as partner since 2015) show that the movement is wider than a sales pitch. When you see those names, in whatever range, someone has paid attention.
Three criteria. No more, no fewer.
The wine tastes of its place. If we cannot tell from the glass that it comes from Galicia and not La Mancha, it does not go into the range.
The producer does everything themselves. From pruning to the label. Bought-in grapes are the exception, not the rule.
We know the person. We have been to the winery, eaten with them, watched them work. We do not buy any other way.
You drink wine that can be different every time. That takes getting used to if you are used to brand consistency. It is also the reason some bottles stay with you for days.
And you support a wine world in which four hectares in the mountains is allowed to be a business.
Handverlesene Weine aus den Regionen, die wir in diesem Artikel vorstellen – direkt aus der Schweiz bestellen.
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