Mauricio arguably produces 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. The sun shines through the slats of its walls, within which there is absolutely no temperature control. 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 destemmer that he shares with some friends. But make no mistake, he is certainly not some novice or unskilled winemaker. Mauricio spent a decade working in industrial wineries in Mendoza and the north of Chile before he settled in Biobío committing to a better life for himself and his family and to make wine on his terms.

Mauricio 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.

Oh yeah! If he weren’t already badass enough, in his spare time he also trains and races Arabian horses owning three or four himself!