The crazy winemakers sending a message in every bottle

They're crazy. They say that wine is more than just a silky, shiny red liquid that you get from a bunch of grapes once a year. And they act accordingly. They're extremists. They say that wine is a miracle, an essential part of our culture, and insist that each and every one of their bottles contains the mystery of unique soil and grapes; an inimitable light, aroma, flora and fauna; an unrepeatable tradition and history; a link that connects us to the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, and to the Cistercian monasteries and centuries of a natural form of winemaking before there were any tractors, herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. Before trends and marketing. For these crazy people, wine should be sustenance, health, magic and pleasure. Excellence. The reflection of a country. A way of life that is disappearing, which they are trying to recover. The traits that best define us, summed up in a bottle. That's how they want to sell it to the rest of the world. Because wine, apart from its romantic side is also a 200-billion-eurobusiness. A red goldmine that offers unique landscapes for first-class tourism in these times of crisis.

Spain's wines have neither Old World prestige nor New World chic

"Our best defense in a globalized world is quality based on tradition"

"If you get stressed out, you start using a tractor and end up with ordinary wine"

They fight to defend that model: the cult of winemaking and a return to its origins. They do so with little money and lots of ambition, often to the incomprehension of their colleagues and neighbors, who never understood their philosophy and wrote them off as eccentric. They didn't receive a cent from public administrations, because for them, modernizing the winemaking sector meant mechanizing, standardizing... and losing its soul.

That is not the road map these crazy people have chosen to follow, because it leads absolutely nowhere. Spain is the largest wine-producing country in the world in terms of vineyard hectares, with more varieties and tradition than any other. Yet it sells its bottles on international markets at a much lower price than its rivals from the Old World (France and Italy). At the same time, it can't compete with the New World (Australia, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, and South Africa) in the lower segments. We're not old or new; good or bad: we're invisible. And that is obvious at any major wine store in London or New York, where Spanish brands are absent from the shelf and you have to go to neighborhood supermarkets to find a cheap cava and mediocre reds from Spain. That lack of prestige is also evident at duty-free shops in airports around the world, where you find our most old-fashioned wines with the ugliest labels next to glamorous French labels, friendly Italians and the cool-looking new players. This is the image we project to the world: low price, little-to-no image and even less appeal. These stereotypes must be destroyed. The international leaders in the sector call our vineyards "a diamond in the rough that is almost entirely ignored, which is very surprising." Apparently, here in Spain we haven't realized this yet.

In June, I attended an event in Boston organized by the magazine Wine Spectator , one of the global Bibles of the sector. It drew 200 of the best wineries from around 20 countries, eager to show their products to a thousand-some aficionados who had paid 200 euroa pop to attend. It was a one-of-a-kind opportunity to promote Spanish wine in the United States, to find out what the competition was up to and learn about consumer tastes. Yet we made a terrible impression in Boston, much worse than France, Italy, Argentina and Australia. Very few owners of Spanish wineries had bothered to go to the United States. They had decided to leave their stands in the hands of salespeople, most of whom had never been to Spain, weren't familiar with the winery they were representing and didn't speak Spanish. That same night, one of the few winemakers who did attend, José Manuel Ortega, a hyperactive ex-banker who makes wine in Argentina, Chile and Ribera del Duero, and who travels hundreds of kilometers in economy class with wines under his arm and has earned the praise of The New York Times for his wines from Malbec, gave me one of the keys to the Spanish fiasco: "Each denominación fends for itself and there is no image abroad of Spanish wines as a whole, not even of Spain as a whole; there aren't any good Spanish restaurants in the world that serve our products, like the Italians do; nor have we managed to promote wine tourism, which in Napa [California] draws nine million people, and in Argentina, nearly two million - people who spend and provide word of mouth. And above all, our commercial effort has been minimal."

Next to him, another important man in the sector, Gonzalo Verdera, a Harvard-trained economist and promoter of Todovino, one of the most modern, active wine clubs in Spain (created with the objective of being the "personal sommelier" of each of its clients), shares this opinion: "We've sold a lot of wine abroad, but we haven't managed to create a country brand... We've made great wines, but a business structure of management, communication and marketing hasn't been built around them. The future? We have to target the middle class, make quality 10-euro wines with a clean, clear image. And most importantly, we've got to define that image of Spain that we can't quite seem to get clear."

In this bleak situation, the crazy ones say that the key to success is filling each bottle with quality, personality and difference... and learning how to sell them. Something that we've never done other than with the generic wines by the liter that we historically sent to Europe in exchange for a pittance. We do the same thing with olive oil; we give it to the Italians to bottle and sell at sky-high prices in sophisticated gourmet boutiques in cities like New York and Tokyo. The crazies want to get noticed; to defend what is ours.

Benjamín Romeo is a whiz at winemaking and business. With the patience of a gardener, he has managed to make, in San Vicente de la Sonsierra, some of the best (and priciest) wines in La Rioja. We take a stroll through the vineyards he inherited from his father, where he started from scratch 15 years ago. Today he exports 90 percent of his total production. "Faced with globalization, our best defense is quality, and in Spain, that quality is based on tradition. We've got to take the best of our ancestors' legacy and develop it, update it. We all know that the Chinese can buy the best French barrels and plant the best varieties, but they can't take the clay, the fog, the River Ebro or the Toloño mountains. Those things are ours. And they're our best marketing strategy."

At his new winery in San Vicente, Benjamín has set up a handful of cameras that point at his vineyards and his village. "When I'm in Japan, let's say, I pull out my tablet, switch on my cameras by remote and I show them what this is like; our grapes, the sky, the castle, where we come from and what our project is. And they get it. The Japanese are very sensitive to pure things; they eat raw fish."

This is also the opinion of one of the most powerful (and feared) men in Spanish wine, Jorge Ordóñez, the founder of Fine Estates from Spain, a Massachusetts-based company that exports our best wines to the United States. Ordóñez is also an experienced trendsetter capable of defining what wines need to be like to win over the American critics. This is precisely what he has done with various brands, produced under his supervision all over Spain, in regions like Toro, Campo de Borja and Jumilla, overlooked by decades in an industry monopolized by La Rioja. "The key to a winery is good grapes. If you've got them, you've got good wine for decades. For years, we uprooted the best that we had, our immemorial grapes, and we planted foreign varieties because we thought that was what the market wanted. We were wrong. The big New World corporations can make those mainstream wines, made from international grapes cheaper, and sell them better, than us. The key to selling in North America is our diversity of grapes, landscapes and designations of origin (we've got 70). For many New World consumers, we're one of the newcomers; they can't locate us on the map. So you have to get didactic, travel thousands of kilometers, dip into your pocket and explain to the distributors, to the shop owners, to the critics, that we've been doing this for 3,000 years." Along with personality, quality is the other key to a wine's success. Isacín Muga, the venerable, extremely clever president of the winery that bears his family name in Haro, confirms this in a single sentence: "You only fool the client once."

The crazy ones have gone back to their roots. They are the children and grandchildren of winemakers. They tend their old vineyards as if they were Japanese gardens. Every stock has a name and they cultivate it with their hands with the painstaking attention given to a bonsai tree. "How am I going to travel? Who would take care of the vineyards? I do everything, from plowing and pruning to harvesting and bottling," says Emilio Rojo. An engineer by training, in 1986 he left the capital and returned to Arnoia (Ourense province, Galicia), to his father's land, to make the best Ribeiro in history - just 5,000 bottles a year - in a tiny little vineyard.

"You're in the vineyards all day - you know them like a daughter and each year, you interpret them differently," says Abel Mendoza, one of the greatest and most honest winemakers in La Rioja. Abel and his wife Maite give us a tour of their vineyard in Marrarte. "The winemaker just manages what the earth produces; each vintage is a surprise. If it rains or if it's hot, you get a different outcome. You never do the same thing twice. You interpret." Adds Abel: "This is a profession based on common sense. If you protect the environment, if you don't put junk into it, you'll make the future better for generations to come. You've got to respect the land, and think long term. Because in the short term you get stressed out by the mortgage, start using a tractor and end up making an ordinary wine. That's what's happening to people here: the big wineries pay so little for the grapes (a tenth of what they paid 10 years ago), that farmers don't want have anything to do with it." He explains how he took the risk of going from growing grapes, as his family has always done, to making his own wine, bottling and labeling it. "People said, 'What does he think he's doing?' Today I make a living off it; it pays for my vacations and I've got friends all over the world. And that's all I want. A bottle of wine is like a book. If you don't get the context, the story and the setting in the first few minutes, it's boring. If it doesn't inspire you, you don't buy it again."

The crazy gang rejects chemistry, mass production and lavish plantations. They search out flaws with their gut. They use the weapons of ecology and biodynamics. They plow with mules. They fertilize with cow manure. They prune by hand. They look up at the sky, and try the grapes. They let the movement of the stars guide them. They're in no hurry. They're not willing to produce more to line their pockets and ruin their future. And they wouldn't think of planting varieties and fast-growing clones to get rich as quick as possible. That has been the mistake many wineries have made, especially in Ribera del Duero, where production was doubled, tripled, even quadrupled before the bubble burst. "As one Moroccan guy who works with us likes to say, 'haste kills, my friend,' says Carles Ortiz, who makes, together with his partner Esther Nin, some of the new gems in the Priorato region. With them, we climb up the side of Mas d'en Casa d'Or, their Paleolithic vineyards in Porrera.

At the bottom of the valley, we can make out the same Ebro that we explored in La Rioja with Benjamín and Abel. In Carles and Esther's vineyards, there's no room for chemistry. Their remedies against parasites and plagues are potions made out of rainwater, chamomile, field horsetail and dandelion. They interfere with nature as little as possible, and the rewards are incomparable wines. Esther is also the enologist for Clos Erasmus, one of the most famous, sought-after wines in the region. Carles pulls his mule and Esther carries Roger, their son, on her chest. Flowers, pear and quince trees grow among the vines. Esther picks fruit, mashes it up and puts it in the baby's mouth. "Roger will grow up among the vineyards. We don't have anyone to take care of him; we preferred to hire another person to help us cultivate. Right now, that seems more important."

Esther and Carles belong to the second generation of hippies in the Priorato region. The first arrived in the early 1980s and consisted of Rene Barbier, Álvaro Palacios, José Luis Pérez, Carles Pastrana and Daphne Glorian. These five made the region famous, and scored high on the rankings of the international wine guru Bob Parker. This second generation wants to go a step further and make a natural, different, organic product. They're friends, as they show us at a dinner where two competitors in the new Priorato, Esther and Dominik Huber, share wine, laughs and food. There's more to life than selling.

Things have changed. The crazy ones no longer show their wineries; they show their vineyards. And they have a reason for it. As Juan Muga, the third-generation chief of the legendary Rioja winery, points out: "It's taken us decades to realize that wine is made in the vineyards, not in the wineries." And the days of speculating with wine and real estate are over. There are hundreds of wineries up for sale, full of expensive, mediocre wine no one wants to buy. Exactly like the expensive, mediocre wine from other wineries up for sale that no one wants to buy. The pendulum has swung. It's no longer about making great 100-euro wines, but great 10-euro wines that allow you to make limited editions of great 100-euro wines. That's the challenge: decent wines at reasonable prices that are different, fresh and light. Bold, with less wood. Wines meant to drink, not to satisfy the critics.

It's also about seducing a whole new generation of consumers currently addicted to beer and spirits. Spaniards drink less wine than ever; 17 liters per person per year. Half as much as in Italy or France. Half as much as in 2000; only a quarter as much as 50 years ago. The crazy gang knows this. That's why they're determined to reach as many people as possible, and show them the secrets of a certain lime or clay in the soil; of some little grapes gathered in a compact, concentrated bunches. That's their obsession. They're not about to invest in real estate or wineries designed by star architects; they've started out with loans, in garages, flats and warehouses, with just a couple of barrels. They're not interested in stately homes with coats of arms, but in getting their hands on the best forgotten vineyards. Land that was covered with vines centuries ago which they locate and replant with the original grapes, then wait for nature to do the rest. It can take 35 years before they yield a good wine. Patience is the first virtue that a winemaker should have. As the Baroness Rothschild herself said, "Once you've been doing this for 300 years, everything goes smooth as silk."

The crazy winemakers are clear on one thing: even though they act locally, their scope of action should be global. They're willing to go further with what they consider to be the best wine in Spanish history. They know that the key is to convey the message in every bottle, to boost the rest of the sector (as the five most legendary Bordeaux do in France, or the super-Tuscans do in Italy) and show that there is a cleaner, more original, natural way to do things.

Our trip started out in the Bierzo (León province), and that is where it shall end. This winemaking region may be the best example of all. It had lost prestige, and had come to be known for its wine by the liter and nameless reds. But it had different, ancient grapes. In 1999, Álvaro Palacios came here. The genius from the Priorato searched for vineyards and lit the match. He would be followed by his nephew Ricardo, with an organic philosophy taken to the extreme. They were not well received. They had planted the seed, and the most restless souls in the region followed suit. Like Raúl Pérez, who was born here, in Valtuille de Abajo. While we eat chorizo and empanada with his parents, uncles, aunts and cousins, he tells us how his family has been making wine since the 18th century. He also mentions the horrors of the Civil War. In 2005, without a cent to his name, let alone a winery, Raúl made the leap to excellence. In six years, he has managed to create unique wines, sometimes fewer than 1,000 bottles a year, which have won over the international critics, starting with Robert Parker, its high priest. Today, he's the wizard of the Bierzo. And he's expanded to other regions in Spain such as Ribeira Sacra, Monterrei, Rías Baixas, as well as South Africa, Chile and Portugal, where he has started out small. Among friends, for pleasure. For Raúl Pérez, time doesn't matter. He knows that wine is eternal.