100% Pais coming from 1.5 hectares of 150 year old bush vines which are planted on basalt (black volcanic sandy soil) in the valley of Secano Interior de Yumbel. 100% destemmed and fermented and aged in 60 year old pipas. All of Mauricio's wines are zero zero and completely unfined and unfiltered. Bright and lively fruit with lifted acidity.
Mauricio of Estación Yumbel is arguably producing the most honest and authentic expression of Pipeño in a remote section of the already rural Biobío. While in recent years Pipeño has been coopted and used as a marketing tool to describe and sell a variety of different wines, it is at it’s essence a country/farmer wine made from 100% País that ferments and ages in pipas.
(Pipas are old vertical large barrels made from Raulí, the native beechwood that’s both dense and finely grained and takes many decades to mature. Sadly and in order to support the rapidly growing paper industry, the government began removing the native trees in 1974 to replace them with invasive white pines and eucalyptus.)
Mauricio is most definitely working low tech in his old wooden, dirt floored barn. In addition to no corrections on the wines, he employs a tiny old basket press, which he doesn’t even use every year, and an old mechanical de-stemmer that he shares with some friends. He dry farms 4 hectares of Pais, Malbec, and Moscatel, all of which bush vines planted on the volcanic soils of Secano Interior de Yumbel. He barely even uses copper in the vineyards and the wines are all zero zero and completely unfined and unfiltered. He produces somewhere around 18,000 total bottles a year where Pipeño accounts for just over half of that.
Mauricio of Estación Yumbel is arguably producing the most honest and authentic expression of Pipeño in a remote section of the already rural Biobío. While in recent years Pipeño has been coopted and used as a marketing tool to describe and sell a variety of different wines, it is at it’s essence a country/farmer wine made from 100% País that ferments and ages in pipas.
(Pipas are old vertical large barrels made from Raulí, the native beechwood that’s both dense and finely grained and takes many decades to mature. Sadly and in order to support the rapidly growing paper industry, the government began removing the native trees in 1974 to replace them with invasive white pines and eucalyptus.)
Mauricio is most definitely working low tech in his old wooden, dirt floored barn. In addition to no corrections on the wines, he employs a tiny old basket press, which he doesn’t even use every year, and an old mechanical de-stemmer that he shares with some friends. He dry farms 4 hectares of Pais, Malbec, and Moscatel, all of which bush vines planted on the volcanic soils of Secano Interior de Yumbel. He barely even uses copper in the vineyards and the wines are all zero zero and completely unfined and unfiltered. He produces somewhere around 18,000 total bottles a year where Pipeño accounts for just over half of that.
