Bodegas Frontonio

The Free Bacchus Story

Aragon is the part of Spain that Spain forgets. It sits between Rioja and Catalonia, it has old Garnacha in quantity, and for most of the last century its job was to sell that fruit in bulk to people who put someone else's name on the bottle.

Garnacha is the grape, and at altitude on poor ground it does something the supermarket version never suggests. The old vines here are bush-trained and low, planted on slate and stone that hold very little, and they crop small without anyone asking them to. What comes out is pale for a Spanish red, scented rather than heavy, and built on acidity instead of alcohol — which is why El Jardín de las Iguales reads more like a wine from a cold place than a hot one.

El Jardín de las Iguales comes from one steep, north-facing slope in a side valley above Alpartir. A family called Paseta planted it between 1898 and 1908 and looked after it for more than a hundred years without ever selling a wine from it. Fernando Mora bought it in 2016 and has been rebuilding its old dry-stone terraces since, after American aerial photographs from 1943 and 1957 showed the whole site had once been vines.

Frontonio is certified organic by the Comité Aragonés de Agricultura Ecológica, and we read that certificate in the EU's TRACES register. Fernando Mora and Mario López also farm biodynamically, down to spraying ground quartz packed into cow horns, but that certificate is still on its way. The winery's own wine sheets say "in conversion" to Demeter, and Demeter Spain's register says the same. An earlier note on our row described the estate as "moving to biodynamic", and that is still the honest description.