El Hato y El Garabato, Arribes: Embracing the Cursed Ones

Resilience is part of the job description for every winemaker, but the challenge José and Liliana have undertaken is on a whole other level. Having started in 2015 with “very, very limited resources” in the homeland of José’s great-grandfather in Formariz, the couple now farms 10 hectares across no fewer than 32 plots, where old vines and poor soils keep yields to only around 20,000 bottles a year. Bottles of idiosyncratic field blends with compelling savoury depth, subtlety and soul.

It’s no place for the faint of heart or the money-minded – but as José puts it: “Almost anywhere would have been an easier spot to start a business. But our roots are here, and something else drives us: the determination to keep this place from disappearing.”

Words by Milan Nestarec & Lucie Kohoutová, photos courtesy of El Hato y El Garabato

I’m curious about the name of your winery – it comes from a moment in Don Quijote where Sancho Panza, exasperated after a bad night on the road, says he's ready to give up his whole "hato y garabato" — his bundle of belongings and the hooked stick he carries it on — if things get any worse. Did you choose that name in a moment where things were particularly tough, or there’s actually a whole different context to it?

We were about to start a new adventure: building a winery from scratch. We were going to put everything we had into it, not just our hopes and dreams, but also our very limited financial resources.

It was just around that time that we came across this passage where Sancho is also willing to give up everything he owns, even though he has very little: his “hato y garabato”. We liked the expression.

You studied oenology in Rioja and worked in places as diverse as Toro, Kyrgyzstan, Central America, California, Norway, Australia, the UK and Portugal, while your wife Liliana was building a parallel career in forestry and protected-area management. Quite a journey for both of you. How did you decide what came next?

We’ve always believed that experiencing different places and ways of life is a way to learn and grow. That’s what led us to travel so much, always trying to go beyond conventional tourism.

When we decided to change careers and move into wine, all we knew was how to drink it [laughs]. But we had a pretty clear plan: study, work at the best wineries we could, and get to know the wine world from different perspectives. All of it with one clear idea in mind: to build our own project in Arribes, with old vines and honest wines that reflect where they come from.

Was there a specific moment in that back-and-forth when the two of you decided that your great-grandfather’s vineyard in Formariz was the thing to build a life around, rather than a project somewhere with easier work and better market logic?

We love wine, but we care even more about the land. What really brought us here was understanding the ecosystem of life, culture, history, tradition and emotion around a specific place. And wine is an amazing product, probably one of the few, that can work alongside that understanding. Our goal was never just to start a winery. We wanted to build a life here for ourselves and our family.

Almost anywhere would have been an easier spot to start a business. But our roots are here, and something else drives us: the determination to keep this place from disappearing.

Of course, the financial side matters in any business, but the values behind it matter even more. We can’t work just for money.

Some wine regions carry an established reputation that helps their producers to open doors, others don't and have to work much, much harder to be known — I imagine Arribes, given how tiny it is, is the latter. Did you experience your DO [Denominación de Origen] name as a real obstacle in your early years selling wine, or did you actually manage to turn a disadvantage into an asset? Or, even more, did you see it as your calling?

Arribes is an unknown wine region. We work with grape varieties nobody has heard of, and we’re a young winery. So yes, the market is difficult for us.

There have been moments of doubt, as there always are, when I wondered whether I’d completely lost my mind, putting everything we had into a project with so many headwinds.

But today it’s something we’re very proud of. We’re absolutely convinced that many of the most exciting wines in the coming years, and some we’re already seeing, will come from these “forgotten regions” and from grape varieties long dismissed as inferior. I’m sure Arribes has this potential. I’ve always felt that, even in the moments of doubt.

I now feel lucky to work in a place like Arribes, with these forgotten, supposedly “inferior” grapes. We call them “the cursed ones.”

I read that Japan has become your main export market for wines built on native varieties most Spanish drinkers have never even tasted. Do you have a theory for why that particular audience responded to what you're doing?

I don’t think we’ve ever enjoyed drinking our own wines as much as we did in Japan, paired with Japanese food.

Our theory is that Japanese cuisine is very delicate yet also incredibly flavour-intense, and that works really well with our wines. They are all about subtlety and simplicity, with low alcohol and good natural acidity, which we feel makes them a great match with Japanese food.

You work with dozens of tiny, scattered parcels within Arribes, a DO that has only about 300 hectares registered in total – smaller than many single commercial estates in Spain, to put things into context. What does farming actually look like on that scale on a daily basis – is it more like tending two dozen separate gardens than running one vineyard? And how challenging – or not – is the harvest in such conditions?

We currently work with 32 plots covering a total of 10 hectares, spread across a 40 km radius. Indeed, it’s pretty crazy!

There are some advantages, like the fact that frost or hail never affects all our vineyards at once. But it also makes everything much more complicated, especially during harvest.

Logistics, keeping track of each plot, and production costs all become much more demanding. As I mentioned earlier, we started with very, very limited resources, so renting vineyards was our only real option, and this is one of the consequences.

But there’s also a beautiful side to all this: it allows us to discover the incredible diversity of Arribes. Every plot gives us the chance to tell a different story through wine.

So much so that Liliana has to stop me from releasing new wines every year! [laughs]

Oh, I can absolutely relate to that, just look at the history of our wine portfolio [laughs]. In our case, it was partly due to the many varieties that used to be planted in our vineyards – a heritage of the recent decades when people would plant just about anything available, either out of necessity or trend... And I also needed to experiment, of course, the curiosity of youth [laughs]. You guys have got three quite different soils within your area – clay at the DO's edge, granitic sands on the plateau, schist and slate down in the canyon – and altitude swinging from over 700m ASL to just above 300m. Do you always vinify plot by plot, to keep those differences distinct, or are some sites blended together for the practicality of it? Or for other reasons?

We always vinify each plot separately, and we keep the wines separate during ageing too, until we decide on the final blends.

We approach each plot with a particular wine in mind, trying to make a wine that can tell a specific story. And sometimes, that means the final wine is a blend of different plots.

It’s a more expensive way of working, but we’re a young project in an old region that has only recently started exploring its potential for quality wines. So we still have a lot to learn, and working plot by plot teaches us a lot every year!

You work with autochthonous vines that are 80 to 120 years old and trained en vaso – low bushes close to the ground, quite a unique heritage. Is there a practical reason these varieties and training survived in Arribes specifically – isolation, lack of investment in "modernizing" the vineyards – or is it simply that nobody ever had any cause to rip them out?

This is a poor and isolated region. Traditionally, every family had a vineyard as part of a subsistence economy. In the 1960s and ’70s, the region began to empty out. Young people left to escape poverty, and villages and farmland were gradually abandoned. On top of that, the development of the Spanish wine industry in the 1980s and ’90s never really reached this area.

The few vineyards that remain are now at risk of disappearing. But it goes beyond the vineyards: this whole region, with its traditions, history and culture, is at risk, too.

Yet traces of all of that remain, such as the unique grape varieties and a traditional vineyard structure that has already disappeared from many other regions – not just the traditional "en vaso" bush vines system, but especially the high diversity of co-planted varieties both white and red, all mixed together in the same plot.

Traditionally, the most productive grape was planted as the main variety – in our case, that’s Juan García – and it was accompanied by many other varieties that the viticulturist felt brought something interesting to the blend: acidity, color, structure...

How is it to work with vines this old? I personally love old plots and collect them patiently like gems in a jewellery box, despite the associated challenges like tiny yields, hard-to-fill gaps or esca. (“Old” meaning usually around 50 years, in our specific context, so much younger than yours.) Is it a give-and-take for you as well, or is it actually smoother than it might seem? How, for example, do you approach replanting or vine renewal, if needed?

Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see a dramatic decline in old vineyards across Spain over the coming years. As you say, yields are extremely low and the challenges are huge: finding people to work in the vineyards and dealing with very high production costs.

On top of that, regions like Arribes don’t have a strong enough reputation to command the prices needed to make these vineyards economically viable.

The challenge is finding a way to give all of that the value it deserves, so that these vineyards can continue to exist.

We still have a long way to go and some big challenges ahead. Replanting and restoring vineyards is one of them. We’ve barely been able to tackle replanting so far, and when we have, to be honest, we haven’t had much success... But we’re pretty stubborn people! [laughs]

Speaking about grapes, you work with so many: Juan García, Bruñal, Bastardo, Tinto Geromo, Mandón in reds; Doña Blanca and Puesta en Cruz in whites, all grape varieties that I reckon most wine drinkers outside Arribes won't recognize. Which of them gave you the most trouble to actually understand in the cellar? And how is it to work with varieties that very few people have experience with? I imagine it as a very niche situation with little literature or people to call when you encounter a problem, but maybe I’m wrong.

You’re not wrong at all! It’s exactly as you describe.

More than any single variety, the real challenge for us has been learning how to work with all of them together. For us, Arribes is a region of local grape varieties that have traditionally grown together. In a single plot, we can find 10 or 15 different ones.

Our way of interpreting Arribes is to work with these field blends through cofermentation. On the one hand, we believe this is a big part of the region’s identity. But we’ve also discovered that these blends bring a complexity and richness of texture that would be very difficult to achieve with a single variety.

We look for balance between ripe grapes and others that are still green, between white and red varieties, and between grapes that dominate the blend and others that simply play a supporting role.

Our experience working at Niepoort in Portugal helped us a lot in understanding this approach. There, we found examples of mixed-variety winemaking that are much less common in Spain.

But when it comes to our particular varieties, there’s hardly any previous experience to draw on. So we’re still learning, trying to understand how they work together and what each one brings to the wine.

Your own description of the winemaking at El Hato y El Garabato is "pocas analíticas, mucha intuición" – few lab tests, a lot of intuition. Was leaning into intuition a deliberate departure from how you'd been taught to make wine, or is it actually a natural follow-up of your previous journey?

It’s probably a combination of things. Starting with very limited resources, strange as it may sound, has its advantages. One of them is that it forces you to rely more on intuition. But that’s not the only reason. This way of working also fits much better with who we are. We’re not exactly Cartesian thinkers!

Over the years, every time we’ve moved away from conventional winemaking practices, we’ve found more authenticity and purity in our wines. So we’ve tried to listen to what the wine is telling us. And that’s not always easy. You need to keep an open mind and be willing to make mistakes.

"De Buena Jera", the name of your top cuvée, is a Zamoran expression for a job done well and enjoyed. You've said the idea behind that wine is to intervene only exactly as much as the parcel needs – has that changed over the years, or do you basically make this wine the same way every year?

We always try to intervene as little as possible. Essentially, that means deciding whether or not to use sulphites, depending on what we feel is necessary for the wine to express the vineyard.

There are certain winemaking principles we always stick to: 100% whole bunches, gentle extraction and, in the case of this wine, long macerations. But we adapt the maceration each year according to what we feel works best for that particular vintage. So yes, we have a clear winemaking philosophy for this wine, but we don’t follow a fixed recipe.

What do you think the future of wine looks like? And do you see your two daughters continuing in your footsteps, or they seem to diverge? Asking as a father myself :D

We started El Hato y El Garabato as a life project for our family, but we’ve never tried to steer our daughters toward any particular career. We want them to do what we did: choose their own path, whatever makes them happy and whatever they’re passionate about.

A few months ago, our eldest daughter, who’s 16, told us we’d better start thinking about the fact that she’d soon be joining us at the winery. I had no idea how happy that would make me!

Since then, the way I look at the future of El Hato y El Garabato has changed. It’s also given us a renewed sense of excitement about the project, and projects like ours depend a lot on that excitement and enthusiasm.

Maybe we’ll even start thinking about investing in what will become the old vineyards of the future!

And as for the future of the wine industry... Well, we’re going through a difficult time, but we like to look ahead with hope.

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