Escorihuela Gascón

The Free Bacchus Story

Escorihuela Gascón has been making wine since 1884 and sells twelve different lines. Exactly one of them is organic. That is the useful thing to know about this house, and it is the reason it appears here at all: the listing is for the certified part, not for the company.

The certified part is a vineyard called El Cepillo, high in the Uco Valley at 1,200 to 1,300 metres, planted in 2006 and finished in 2017 at 66 hectares. Altitude that severe is hard to farm. Frost at El Cepillo has taken whole crops that took months to grow, as the Mendoza daily Los Andes put it, and the first vintage from the organic and biodynamic vines only came out in 2015.

Both certificates are real and both are checkable. Letis certifies the vineyard and the cellars organic, and the Demeter federation registers the estate and both cellars as a biodynamic operator through to the end of 2027. But a certified cellar is not a certified wine, and the house says so itself: the winemaker, Matías Ciciani, has explained that the same certified Agrelo cellar is where they make all their high-end wines, most of which are nothing to do with organics.

The wine that is organic, Organic Vineyard Malbec, comes from a single parcel of El Cepillo and sees no oak at all — eight months in steel, eight months in bottle, fermented with the yeasts that arrive on the fruit. That is an unusual decision for a Malbec at this level, and a deliberate one: the point was to leave the vineyard audible. Decanter scored the 2018 at 94 points and described it as fruity and floral with a chalky texture.

One warning, because the names are a word apart. The organic wine travels abroad as Escorihuela 1884 Single Vineyard. A different, cheaper wine called 1884 Estate Grown is not organic and not from El Cepillo.