Antiyal

The Free Bacchus Story

Five hectares is not very much land. You could walk the whole of Antiyal in twenty minutes, and if you did, you would be walking past roughly one four-hundredth of what a large Chilean export winery farms in a season.

Alvaro Espinoza knew that arithmetic better than most people alive, because he had spent years as a consulting winemaker moving between wine regions in Chile and Spain, working at exactly the scale he later declined. He had run organic trials at Viña Carmen in the early 1990s and shown them to the owner, whose answer was that if he wanted to experiment he could do it at his own expense. He did. When he established Antiyal in 1998, it was not the decision of someone who had never seen the alternative. It was the decision of someone who had seen it closely and wanted to find out what happened if you did the opposite.

The vineyard sits in the Maipo Valley, one of Chile's warmest and most historically significant red zones, planted to Cabernet Sauvignon, Carmenère and Syrah under IMO certified organic standards with biodynamic practice across the whole site. The small scale is the argument, not a limitation of it: Espinoza's position, held consistently for more than two decades, is that the attention individual vines and living soil require is simply not available at industrial volume. It is not a criticism of the big producers, who are solving a different problem. It is a statement about what a person can actually keep an eye on.

The results have been unusually clear. Antiyal was the first Chilean wine to take a Best in Show Organic designation at the Decanter World Wine Awards, and the flagship blend has drawn 96 points from Wine Advocate — recognition earned without conceding to the softer international style that dominated Chilean export wine through the 1990s and 2000s. The wines are structured, earthier and more specific to their site than the category average, which is what you would expect from fruit somebody actually walked past every week.