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, with Demeter on the biodynamic side and IMO on the organic. Pelizzatti is the son of Italian immigrants with viticultural roots in the north of Italy.

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.

Wine Advocate scored the Estate Selection Malbec 94 points and the estate has taken Gold at the Decanter World Wine Awards. Fermentation is spontaneous, sulphur is minimal or absent, and the wines are neither fined nor filtered. The name comes from the Andean cross on the label.

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