Comando G

The Free Bacchus Story

Garnacha is the grape Spain spent decades tearing out to plant Tempranillo instead. Fernando García and Daniel Gómez Jiménez-Landi met at university in 2005, and by 2008 they had a company and a plan that amounted to going up into the mountains to find whatever was left of it.

Most people have met Garnacha already, and it usually turns up warm, generous and high in alcohol. The Sierra de Gredos does something else with it entirely. The range runs between Madrid and Ávila, and the old plots sit on granite at altitudes that would be unfarmable anywhere warmer — Rozas at nine hundred metres, Rumbo al Norte at eleven hundred and fifty. The nights stay cold right through ripening, the granite holds almost nothing a vine can live on, and what comes out of it is pale, light on its feet and perfumed, far nearer in shape to red Burgundy than to anything the word Garnacha usually promises.

The vines they were after are fifty to eighty years old, bush-trained, each on its own stake, in plots small enough to be named one at a time: Las Umbrías, Rumbo al Norte, Tumba del Rey Moro. Nobody was competing for them. They had survived precisely because they were too small, too steep or too far from anywhere to be worth grubbing up, which is the same set of reasons they are slow and expensive to farm today.

The organic certification is registry-verified in the EU's own TRACES system and runs to 2027, which is exactly the sort of thing this guide exists to check. It is also the least interesting thing about them. Two friends looked at a grape their own country had spent decades digging up, went to the highest and poorest ground they could find, and came back with a red that tastes nearer to Burgundy than to anything Spain was making at the time.