The Winery With No Tractor

In 2014, David Sampedro got rid of his tractor.

Not traded in. Got rid of. His vineyards in Rioja Alavesa have been worked by plough horse ever since, the way his grandfather worked them, because when you walk every row behind a horse you notice things a tractor seat never shows you. There's no stainless steel in his cellar either: concrete and old French oak only. The winery, built into the hillside in 2016, runs off-grid on its own solar and wind.

None of this is a marketing exercise. It's just what happens when someone decides, seriously and completely, that the vineyard matters more than everything else.

We've got three of his wines on the shelf, including the most expensive still wine we've ever stocked. This is the post where we explain why that bottle costs £63 and why we think it's worth it.

A layover in Madrid

The winery is called Bodegas Bhilar, and it's really two people.

David is from Elvillar, a hilltop village of a few hundred people in Rioja Alavesa, in the Basque Country. His family have owned vines there for five generations. He trained as an agricultural engineer and enologist, started with three hectares under his own name in 1999, and has farmed organically since 2006 and biodynamically not long after: the estate now holds full Demeter certification, which is the strict one, and was among the first in Rioja Alavesa to get it.

Melanie Hickman is from Ohio, and was working in Hawaii as a wine sales rep when the two of them met, as the story goes, during a layover in Madrid. She moved to Elvillar, put her life savings into buying vineyard parcels of her own, and now owns roughly half of the sixteen or so hectares between them. The three wines we stock are the couple's joint project, and if you look closely at the labels you'll see her name on the small print alongside his.

Bhilar, by the way, is the village: Elvillar is Bilar in Basque, and David added the h. The village's other claim to fame is a four-thousand-year-old dolmen on its outskirts called the Chabola de la Hechicera, the Sorceress's Hut, which tells you people have found this particular limestone ridge worth settling for a very long time.

Farming on the hard setting

Elvillar sits at around 600 metres, on the chalky limestone slopes that fall away from the Sierra de Cantabria. It's high, poor soil, and the vines here are mostly old bush vines, dry-farmed, spread across more than thirty small parcels.

The farming reads like a dare. Biodynamic preparations made and buried on the estate. Vineyard treatments limited to a little sulphur and, of all things, milk whey. Yields at roughly half what the Rioja rules allow. Everything hand-picked into small crates, fermented on native yeasts, trodden by foot where the wine calls for it, and bottled with total sulphur under 30 mg/l, which is a fraction of the legal limit. And the horses, obviously.

You can farm Rioja much, much more easily than this. The point of doing it the hard way is in the glass: these are wines with unusual freshness and detail for a warm limestone hillside, and they taste of the parcel rather than the recipe.

The dog on the label, sort of

Two of our three bottles say Phinca Hapa. Phinca is their house spelling of finca, an estate or plot. Hapa was Melanie's rescue dog from Hawaii, and the name means "mixed blood" in Hawaiian, which is the joke and the point at once: the Hapa vineyard, planted in 1967 at 646 metres, is co-planted in the old style, red and white grapes muddled together in the same rows, roughly half and half. One parcel, one dog, two wines.

The three we've got in

Phinca Hapa Blanco, £33

The white half of the field, and not really a white at all: mostly old-vine Viura with Garnacha alongside, fermented whole-cluster on its skins for around two months, then a year in big French foudre. It pours amber-gold, with dried apricot, orange peel and honeyed spice over a grippy, waxy texture. A proper skin-contact wine from serious old vines, and the style Tim Atkin has repeatedly scored in the mid-90s in his Rioja reports.

If you liked the sound of our cheaper orange wines but want to know what the style tastes like with old Rioja fruit and real ambition behind it, this is the bottle.

Phinca Hapa Tinto, £30

The red half: Tempranillo with a seasoning of Graciano and a splash of Viura, fermented as whole bunches with native yeast, then around a year and a half in big old French oak. Dark cherry, balsamic herbs, and that chalky, fine-grained tannin that limestone seems to leave in a wine. It's Rioja with the make-up off: no vanilla, no gloss, just the hillside. Luis Gutiérrez at the Wine Advocate has scored recent vintages of this wine 93 and 94 points.

Roast lamb, obviously. But it's just as good with a chop and an early night.

Phinca San Julián, £63

The flagship, and the £63 question.

San Julián is a single parcel of barely half a hectare: a steep ravine of century-old bush vines, a field blend led by Tempranillo with upwards of ten varieties tangled through it, worked entirely by horse, with wild fruit trees still standing among the vines. The grapes are foot-trodden, fermented whole-bunch in small open-top barrels with a gentle daily punch-down, and aged up to two years in new French oak. The yield is around a thousand to thirteen hundred bottles a year. Total. For the whole world.

The 2019 took 94 points from the Wine Advocate, Peñín and Tim Atkin alike, and the Advocate's tasting note reached for "somewhere between Burgundy and Bordeaux", which for a Rioja is quite the compass malfunction. At £63 it's a lot of money, and for what it is, it's arguably cheap: single parcels farmed like this in Burgundy start at three times that. This is the bottle for the birthday, the anniversary, or the Tuesday you've decided to promote.

The Rioja bit

One more thing worth knowing. When a group of Rioja Alavesa producers moved to break away from Rioja altogether and form their own appellation a few years ago, David publicly stayed put. His argument was that redrawing the map changes nothing in the vineyard, and that what Rioja actually needs is a proper quality ladder that rewards growers who farm well. Whatever your politics, that's the argument of a man whose answer to every question is: do the work in the vineyard. The courts eventually shelved the breakaway, and the horses kept ploughing.

Why we stock them

Because this is what "natural wine" looks like when it grows up: not a style or a pose but a farm, certified to the strictest standard there is, run by two people who sold the tractor and meant it. The Hapas are among the best wines on our shelf at any price, and San Julián is the single most serious bottle we've ever put on it.

All three are at the stall in Stockport Indoor Market. The San Julián is the one on the top shelf, being guarded.

And if you'd rather it came to you

If bottles like these turning up at your door sounds appealing, that's what the Wine Boy Club is for: a box of hand-picked wines delivered across Stockport and South Manchester, as often (or not) as you like. No algorithms, no bulk buying, just Mark picking bottles he's excited about. The Hapa Tinto is a natural for the Gold box.

You can see everything currently on the shelf at list.wineboy.co.uk.