Some Ideas

AMORAL

As anywhere else, the world of wine has its own set of moral rules. They form a great compendium of what is right and what is wrong, which is mostly defined for technical and marketing reasons: “Wines cannot be cloudy”, or “Wine needs to spend time in a...

WINE AS FOOD

Wine is above all food; that is how I fundamentally understand it. In the same way that sugars or refined flours have poorer nutritional quality than their whole-grain counterparts, so do refined wines. That is why I defend the idea of unrefined wines, without...

EPHEMERAL WINES

In general, I make small batches of unrepeatable wines. When the batch is finished, that wine won’t be made again, along with its name and its label. And in the few cases I do repeat variety, vineyard, and wine design, the name remains and the year of...

ABUSE-FREE WINES

In Las Payas wines are treated with love. I use as little sulfites as possible; sometimes I just correct the acidity, most of the time not even that. Most wines just have a single ingredient: grape. I don’t add preservatives, antioxidants or stabilizers. I rather let...

FINAL PRINCIPLES

Wines are somehow similar to fish: if they go with the current, it means they are probably dead. That is why in Las Payas we want you to uncork and swim against the current. Wines that go with the flow are somehow dead. The rest, even if they seem they are losing the...

ASSORTED OAKS

In my search for bottling frank wines that are free to be themselves, I began clearing the equation of the various interfering factors that lay between the vineyard and the glass. In this process, I found barrels to be the ultimate homogenizer, which is why I stopped...

THE LABELS

I usually design my own labels, but I know my limitations, so in 2007 I ask a professional to help me out with one design I was having trouble with. The result became what was maybe the first truly revolutionary wine label in Argentina. With a somehow Soviet look, it...

WILD YEASTS

Within our idea of putting a piece of truth inside each bottle, the selected yeasts that come in a packet are out of the game. Such yeasts are one more element in the homogenization and standardization of wine. The grape itself already comes with a combo of...

SULFUR DIOXIDE AND SULFITES

In my attempt to minimize the content of sulfites in the wine, I ended up not using sulfites at all most of the times. I have been traveling this path since the 2013 harvest, learning to make wines without adding sulfites, especially during fermentation so that the...

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