Alpamanta

The Free Bacchus Story

In 2005 two cousins from old wine families, Andrej Razumovsky from Austria and André Hoffmann from Switzerland, set out to build a small winery in Mendoza. They chose Ugarteche, in Luján de Cuyo, and called it Alpamanta, which the winery says means love for the land.

Luján de Cuyo is in Mendoza, the province that makes most of Argentina's wine, and Malbec is its grape, the soft, plummy style the country built its name on. Alpamanta's 35 hectares sit at about 950 metres on sand, clay and silt over limestone. The winery counts around 220 millimetres of rain and 340 days of sun a year, dry enough that it calls the province ideal for organic wine.

The whole estate is farmed biodynamically. Demeter lists Alpamanta as a certified producer and processor, and Ecocert certifies its grapes and wines as organic under the US programme. The farm makes its own preparations from herbs grown in its orchard, composts the grape skins with manure from its cows, sheep and chickens, and does not plough. About half its electricity comes from 250 solar panels, and the winery says it recycles all of its industrial water back into irrigation.

Respect is the top Malbec, and it is made only from the first bunch on each vine. The grapes are picked by hand, fermented with native yeasts in small containers without pumps, aged for a year in 600-litre French oak, and bottled without clarification, stabilisation or filtration.