2020 Dominio del Challao Angelita del Challao Rioja

By the age of 28, Manu Michelini had worked 30 harvests. Among them: Pierre and Olivier Clape in Cornas, Jean-Marc Roulot in Meursault, Clarisse Ramonet in Chassagne-Montrachet, and Simon Bize in Savigny. Almost nobody in wine assembles a résumé like that, and almost nobody who does then goes looking for forgotten vineyards in a village most people drive past.

He found Labastida in 2018, met the local grower Carlos Fernández in 2019, and the two of them started Dominio del Challao. They work six hectares across eight parcels.

The name is his grandmother's. She was born in Mallorca and emigrated in 1951 to a town in Argentina called La Angelita. The small angel on the label, holding a shoot of vine with grapes on it, was drawn by a friend.

What is in the bottle is Rioja the way it was made before commercial planting flattened everything. Ten varieties, red and white, grown together in the same old blocks and fermented together as one wine. Several of them have nearly disappeared from the region. Forty percent goes in as whole bunches, trodden by foot, in concrete on wild yeast. Each parcel ages ten months alone in barrel and foudre inside caves cut into the hillside in the twelfth century, then the blend rests ten months more.

Seventeen thousand bottles. His other Rioja bottlings start at €60 and run to €150.