Catena Zapata

The Free Bacchus Story

Catena Zapata never tells you it is certified. Read the house’s websites end to end — 632 pages in English and Spanish — and the word organic turns up five times, every one of them describing how a vineyard is farmed rather than what a certificate says. No certifier is named anywhere. The registers say something else: thirteen Catena vineyards hold current organic certificates, filed under two different company names.

The one that matters most is Adrianna, high at Gualtallary in Tupungato. Letis has certified its 244 acres since May 2018, under Bodegas Esmeralda, the family’s other company, which is why searching the register for “Catena” alone never finds it. A Wine Advocate note on the 2019 Mundus Bacillus Terrae says the wine “is now certified organic (since 2018)”. The register agrees to the month — about the vineyard.

That wine comes off a parcel of 1.4 hectares, and about 5,400 bottles of the 2019 were filled. The vines went in during 1992 at 1,390 metres on alluvial limestone, and the family has been reading that soil ever since. The family pays for the research that reads it. Their Catena Institute of Wine has forty peer-reviewed papers to its name, and is planting five thousand native Mendoza trees by 2030, chosen because they will need no irrigation of their own.

The Institute also keeps an old vineyard at Rivadavia deliberately diseased. “This vineyard is purposely not virus-free,” it writes, because testing for viruses will get cheaper with time, and the widest possible genetic material is worth more now than a clean but narrow one. It is the kind of decision that only makes sense if you are thinking in decades.

What the certificates cover is fruit, and only fruit. On 26 August 2026 all three of the group’s cellars — the Catena Zapata winery at Agrelo, where the Adrianna wines are made, Bodega Esmeralda at Junín and Bodega Alamos at Vista Flores — surrendered their organic handling certificates. Two handling registrations survive, both at the company’s office in Córdoba rather than at any winery, and both sit in the made-with-organic-grapes category, which allows added sulphites and cannot be labelled organic. So the vines are certified and the wine is not, and no Catena bottle reaches an American shelf as organic. The only certification the house claims for itself is a sustainability protocol.