Koyle

The Free Bacchus Story

In March 2006 the Undurraga family sold the winery that had carried their name for more than a century. They bought a hillside in the Andean foothills of Colchagua whose previous owners had been burning it for charcoal, planted vines on the rocky slopes, and left the family name off the label. Koyle is a purple flower that grows beside the vineyard.

The site is basalt, in the winery’s own description a matrix of rock in various stages of breaking down, and it climbs in three terraces. Yields fall as you go up: the highest ground has only a few centimetres of clay over bedrock, and the vines there carry well under a kilo of fruit each. The top wine comes off 1.6 hectares of it and is called Auma, after the initials of Alfonso Undurraga Mackenna, who bought the place.

Cristóbal Undurraga, who has made the wine since the first day, put the demand of the method plainly in 2018: biodynamics asks you to understand, and to understand you have to be there. He is blunter about why more Chilean growers do not follow: the pressure of the large agrochemical companies, he told a trade magazine in 2020, is always in the farmer’s mind, and universities barely teach organic farming, so growers have no tools for it.

The farming is on two registers. Ecocert certifies 164 acres of vines and the winemaking to the US organic standard, and Demeter lists the operation as a biodynamic producer and processor to March 2027, which covers the cellar as well as the fruit. The winery states no scope in words, but its own labels do: Demeter and EcoCert appear on every wine from Los Lingues, while the Sauvignon Blanc grown on granite at the coast carries a vegan mark and nothing more.