Muchada-Léclapart

The Free Bacchus Story

In 2011 Alejandro Muchada was studying architecture in Seville and had never tasted wine. When his research trip to Morocco fell during Ramadan, he went to work on organic farms in France, and a friend asked him along to a harvest in Champagne, at David Léclapart’s biodynamic estate. In 2013 Léclapart visited Sanlúcar and fell for its white soils, so like the chalk at home. They founded Muchada-Léclapart in 2016. In 2026 Léclapart handed his place to Alberto and Eduardo García of Bodegas Mauro.

Sanlúcar de Barrameda is Sherry country, on the Atlantic and closer to the sea than Jerez. The ground is albariza, a white chalk that soaks up the winter rain and holds it through a summer with none, and the grape is Palomino. On its own it makes a thin, neutral wine, and for Sherry that is the point. In Sanlúcar the wine spends at least two years under flor, a living veil of yeast that keeps it pale and bone dry, and becomes manzanilla. Muchada-Léclapart leave all of that out, making a dry, still white at its natural strength and betting that old vines on chalk have plenty to say by themselves.

Muchada learned the short local pruning, vara y pulgar, from Sanlúcar’s old vineyard crews, and calls one of them, Juan Morales, his mentor. One of their plots in the Pago Miraflores long supplied the manzanilla La Guita. The grapes are picked by hand at night, pressed whole for four hours in a Champagne press, fermented with their own yeasts and left on their lees for eleven months. Less than a tenth of the usual sulphur goes in, and nothing is filtered.

The certificates match the farming. The EU organic register lists the company under the certifier CAAE for growing, making and exporting wine, and Demeter Spain’s register lists it as a certified biodynamic grower and winemaker. Both cover the grapes and the wine.