What Wine Is

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I’d like to introduce you to Manuel Valenzuela, a winegrower, artist, genius and revolutionary who cultivates and vinifies the most extraordinary wines you haven’t tasted, but whose extraordinary wines will affect you.

We’re with Manuel in his vineyards at Bodega Barranco Oscuro in the Sierra de la Contraviesa, which is south of Granada in the region of Andalusia by the south coast of Spain. The sun is rising over the mountains. We’re up at over 1,300 meters. These are the second highest altitude vineyards in all of Europe. It’s the middle of January. The nights are cool. The days are warm. The vines are sleeping.

Manuel is telling us about a visitor to Bodega Barranco Oscuro. A visitor with a depth and breadth of knowledge about wine, but a visitor who was disposed to wines which are made according to the conventions of today’s wine trade. Which is to say, wines cultivated with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides and vinified with sulfur, commercial yeasts, and chemical additives. Which is to say, the kinds of wines made the way 99% of all wines are made today. The kinds of wines which saturate our markets, our society, our culture. The kinds of wines consumed by you and the visitor Manuel is telling us about.

The visitor tasted glass after glass of the kinds of wines Manuel and his son, Lorenzo, make at Bodega Barranco Oscuro—wines made without any chemical additives in the vineyards or in the cellar. Wines like Brut Nature, made with vigiriega, an autochthonous grape of Andalucia, and El Varetúo, made with pinot noir, and El Pino Rojo, made with tempranillo, and Garnata, made with grenache, and Rubaiyat, made with syrah.

After tasting the wines of Barranco Oscuro, the visitor said to Manuel, “If this is wine, then what do I call the other beverage I’ve been drinking?”

Assembly Line Wine?

This is the question we have to ask ourselves about the wines Manuel and Lorenzo make at Barranco Oscuro. And this is the question for the world of wine. How can a beverage made like soda in a factory go by the same name as the beverage made as simply, as naturally, and as honestly as the earth makes its fruits?

In the late 1960s, Manuel and his wife, Rosa, actively opposed the regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The night before the regime was going to arrest Rosa, the couple fled Spain for France. In the late 1970s, after Manuel and Rosa returned to Spain, and after the fall of the Franco regime, the couple acquired a third of an abandoned farmhouse and winery in the Sierra de la Contraviesa, along with about 15 hectares of abandoned land on slopes with almond trees and a few terraced plots. 

As well as the farmhouse, the winery, and the land, the couple’s purchase included two vats of local wine, which Manuel and Rosa, their friends, and the clients of the previous owner of the property happily consumed. When the next harvest arrived, Manuel made more wine. Up until then, the Sierra de la Contraviesa was exclusively a producer of bulk wines. 

But vintage by vintage, for more than 40 years, guided by his intuitive genius, relentless curiosity, ceaseless research, indefatigable industry, and enological artistry, Manuel has created and nurtured a winery which is devoted to the welfare of its earth and the people who drink the fruit of its vines.

The wines of Bodega Barranco Oscuro may be the best wines you haven’t tasted, but you will taste the fruits of Manuel’s labor. The wines of Barranco Oscuro and the winery’s practices of viticulture and viniculture have revolutionized the kinds of wines made in the Sierra de la Contraviesa and all of Andalusia.

And Manuel is a mentor, a guide, and a model to winegrowers across Spain and around the world. Winegrowers who have dedicated themselves to the same proposition Manuel has dedicated himself to. A proposition which stands counter to today’s market conventions of viticulture and enology. A proposition which asks us to grow and make and drink an honest beverage called wine.

Allow me to introduce you to Manuel Valenzuela, a winegrower, an artist, a genius and a revolutionary.