Chakana

The Free Bacchus Story

Argentina's economy collapsed in 2001. Juan Pelizzatti left his job, took his life savings, and walked Mendoza province looking for ground worth spending them on. He settled on Agrelo, at around 960 metres in the Andean foothills, and planted the following year.

The conversion came a decade after the planting. In 2012 he brought in the late Alan York, an American biodynamic consultant with a reputation for working empirically rather than doctrinally, to move both the farming and the winemaking across. Certification followed in stages: organic from the 2014 vintage across all three vineyards, then Demeter at Finca Nuna from 2016, biodynamic on eighty of a hundred and twenty hectares. The other two are organic, one of them still in biodynamic conversion. Pelizzatti is the son of Italian immigrants with viticultural roots in the north of Italy. The family stepped down from the project at the end of 2019, and Nicolas Cricco runs it now.

The holding widened in 2011 with two vineyards at Altamira in the Uco Valley and a hundred-year-old Malbec parcel at Mayor Drummond. The range of ground now runs from calcareous high-altitude sites to the loamy colluvial soils of Agrelo.

Vinous scored the Estate Malbec 94 points, and the same wine took Silver at the Decanter World Wine Awards. Fermentation is spontaneous on the vineyard's own yeasts and nothing is fined out; the Ayni wines go into bottle unfiltered as well, and the Sobrenatural bottling is made with no added sulphur at all. The name comes from the Andean cross on the label.

Ninety-four points on a bottle near thirty dollars is the part worth noticing. Biodynamic farming and scores of that order usually sit at opposite ends of the same shelf.