Luis Cabezas touched the gnarled, bare arm of a grapevine and tenderly wiped away a tear. Not his but of a section of the squat plant, that was coated in a sticky liquid. It was sap, and its presence there, said Cabezas, was in response to how the vine had been guided into place by a wire that ran the length of a small plot, at the back of his house in northern Argentina. 

These were Malbecs that belonged to relatives of Cabezas. He takes care of them like he takes care of the three quarters of a hectare that he works, by himself, in the small mountain town of Cafayate. The weather was turning. Spring was close enough to swish around and savour. 

“We say that it is weeping because it wants to release its buds,” he says, of the nascent bloom. The “tears,” he says, were a reaction to the poking and prodding he had given the plants, as he roamed the gallery of vineyards, caressing them, murmuring “let’s go sweetheart, give us lots of grapes.”

These are lessons that he learned from a long line of small scale wine producers in Valles Calchaquies, a roughly 500-kilometer region that stretches across the provinces of Salta, Catamarca, Jujuy and Tucuman. Amid terracotta cliffs and moonscape vistas, the high altitude chain of valleys and mountains is an ecosystem of contrasts. Vibrant greens in the summer. Ocres and burnt browns through the dry, harsh winter. Baked with some 300 days of sun a year, a cleansing wind dances through the ancestral landscape that beats with Indigenous traditions, centuries after colonisation.

Valles Calchaquies, and the small epicentre of Cafayate, is also home to one of Argentina’s most prolific wine regions, with vineyards hugging the sinewy highway and stretching up into the mountainside. Some of the biggest wine purveyors in the country have substantial footprints here, like Grupo Peñaflor, which produces 7 million litres of wine annually out of Bodega El Esteco, or El Porvenir, with 35 wine lines for sale. 

In the shadow of these internationally decorated bodegas, small artisanal producers such as Luis Cabezas are part of a vibrant small-scale wine industry that is starting to flourish. From backyard vineyards to small plots inherited from previous generations who toiled in the fields of large estates, these family-run operations are weaving ancient techniques with contemporary practices. The exploding demand for natural wine produced without pesticides, and with minimal intervention, in North America and Europe belie the reality that these processes have existed forever. 

But who makes the wine that you drink continues to be an exclusive endeavour. In Cafayate, small producers have banded together to address long standing inequalities in the region, such as lack of access to capital for equipment, or a fair share of water for their production. Wine cooperatives have helped amplify their voices, and enable a few to eke out earnings on which their families can depend. This is a revolutionary act, and an emancipatory one in a region where the patterns of dominance established in colonial times are still etched in power structures and possibilities. It is also a deeply personal act - one of connection to the land, and of resistance through existence. 

“We have roots here. Mother Earth told us that we should do things here, and continue that which our grandparents started,” says Dr. Beto Cabezas, Luis’ brother and head of the small Bodeguita Don Aurelio, which he named after his grandfather.  

The Cabezas name holds iconic meaning. Their uncle, Antonio Cabezas, was a pioneer of artisanal wine making in the valley, when the idea of it as an autonomous small scale venture that could sustain a family was just starting to take hold. Antonio, who passed away in 2021 after contracting Covid, was an unassuming fixture in the community, urging other producers to hold on to their unique brand of wine making. He made his wines out of an adobe extension to his modest home, with dirt floors and sparse furnishings, and it’s there that he would impart some of his “secrets.”

“This is something that is hereditary, I think you can say,” Antonio says in a 1988 video recording in which he describes the wine making process he learned from his father. 

His stature started to attract international attention after he was featured in Mondovino (2004), a documentary by filmmaker Jonathan Nossiter that explored the impact that globalisation was having on wine making. Tourists from Europe and the United States would come to Tolombón, the dusty desert village where Antonio lived next to Cafayate, in search of his robust wines and their simple packaging. But Antonio never changed his methods, and it lives on today through his nephews, and other wine producers who turned to him as their example.

“It’s always said that wine is an artform,” says Sacha Haro Galli. “When it is natural and artisanal, every wine is truly a unique creation, that comes from how the Pachamama came together to produce the grape, the minerals that the roots sought from the earth, the water, the sun. There’s also a cosmic energy. And the human hand that made it come out one way, or another.” 

In the yard of a new bodega under construction in the tiny town of Tolombón, there is an oak tree. Its branches elongate over the land, casting shapes and shadows that sway in the breeze. Like the barrels of wine that are conserved next door, this tree has Antonio Cabezas’ fingerprints. He planted it many years ago, and now its trunk is too wide to embrace. 

“It’s an incredible oak,” says his nephew Dr. Beto. “Brought here from la pampa.” 

The tree is in the middle of what was Antonio’s property. After his death, it was sold to wine maker Francisco "Paco" Puga, who is transforming it into his own bodega, with an enormous ornate wooden door as its entrance. It’s here that Antonio used to make his wine, toiling under a singular, naked lightbulb dangling from the ceiling that cast a triangle haze over a table covered in a fraying table cloth. Although towards the end of his life, Antonio was almost blind, he moved with agility in the shadows of his workshop, among the wooden barrels and glass demijohn bottles filled with the fruits of his labour.

“One of the secrets of artisanal or patero wine, as we call it here, is that the container has to be very clean,” Antonio said in the 1988 video recording.

He and his helpers would harvest grapes in his vineyard a short drive away, usually during the day, and then go about sorting and stomping on the grapes barefoot in the traditional style of maceration. This usually occurred after sunset, to avoid pesky bees. Sometimes, there was music from the radio, or a football game. His stories would stray to his family, and memories of his father going off to the big city with a donkey carrying the wine he had made. And the euphoria that his family would feel when he returned, with all his wine sold.  

“He was a very special person, like many older people, the past was always better,” recalls Nicolás Heredia, an Argentine photographer who spent an afternoon with Antonio in 2020, documenting him. 

“There was melancholy in his memories,” he said. “He really remembered his family as connected to a production as beautiful as wine production. He felt it on a very personal level.” 

In the Valles Calchaquies, words are used sparingly. At least among the locals, many of whom come from a long line of peasant families, and have Indigenous ancestry in their blood. Concise and concrete. Sometimes murmuring. It’s a method of speaking and relating to each other and the world that is a product of a system of domination dating back to pre-colonial times, said Matías Maita, a local historian and ex-cultural secretary of Cafayate. 

The first vines are said to have arrived in Salta in the 1500s by way of Jesuit missionaries. For a time, it was a venture reserved exclusively for religious ceremonies. Later, wealthy landowners established fincas that perpetuated colonial patterns of subjugation and control through feudal methods of organisation. Workers lived on large estates, and were paid through goods rather than currency, said Maita. Theirs was a life built upon collective use of lands, that revolved around livestock and harvest. But it created economic barriers to their ability to break out, if they even wanted to. Cracks in this system started to form in the 1940s and 1950s, fueled by broader social movements that sought to empower impoverished sectors of society. As large, family-owned properties were replaced by corporate run wineries, workers relocated onto smaller more urban plots of land, many of which you will see today with small vineyards flourishing often for personal use. In one case, a wine making estancia went bankrupt around the 1940s or 1950s. At the behest of the government, it carved up its land and distributed it among workers to whom it owed back pay, creating a contingent of small land owners, among them the family Cabezas.

“Most of the small producers [today] are descendents of Indigenous Peoples,” says Hugo Guantay, a renowned artist in the valley. “They probably were pawns on the estates, or harvesters. Some of them had the good fortune of being able to pass through the buildings where they made the wine, and learn the skill of making it.” 

This history is depicted on canvases left behind by local painter Calixto Mamani, now deceased. Men under climbing vines. Women next to baskets of grapes. Stacks of wooden barrels in small bodegas. Mamani’s language reflected this kind of sensibility, with such iconic turns of phrases such as “I work to be happy” or “we have to do with what we have.” 

(“Yo trabajo para ser feliz” o “hay que darse maña con lo que hay.”)

Mamani was among a generation of Cafayate residents who Maita and Guantay describe as “pioneers” for their ability to see beyond the option of a life of servitude. Here too fits Antonio, who never wavered from his traditional forms of wine making, swimming against the current at a time when artisanal wine was not officially sanctioned by the state.

“To see him working, showing that real desire he had to make wine, it really inspired me to stick to my project,” says Miguel Terraza, a wine producer in the valley. “He helped a lot of us see that it was totally possible,” says Sacha. All of the producers of the Valles Calchaquíes have inherited a piece of that legacy, he adds.

“We are a kind of heritage, a natural landscape, a cultural landscape and a human and historical landscape,” says Maita. 

Fragments of that life remain, in creased old photos of Antonio as a young man that his sister Nidia has kept in the house that the two of them shared. She has conserved his bedroom just the way he left it, a single cot as a bed, with a patterned blanket folded at its foot, and a broom leaning up against the wall, brushes pointed up. In his absence, she continues to bottle the barrels of wine that he left behind.

“We came from a very humble family,” says Luis Cabezas. Some of Luis’s earliest memories of wine making came from his grandparents, with whom he spent days and nights on the rugged mountainside. They tended to their herd, took the docile beasts into the wilderness to graze, and gave young Luis fresh milk to drink. “Let’s go get the grapes,” Aurelio would tell the boy. “I remember that he had this filter, that was a giant rock, well carved into the shape of a fork, and the wine would drip down,” says Luis. “It would run along the rock, like a filter. And the drops were clear.”  

“For me, wine production is a word you can’t decipher. It’s a feeling you carry in your body, in your soul,” says Luis Cabezas. “Every morning I wake up and I chat with the press. I talk to the plant. To the vines. I feel so happy because I’m doing what I love.” 

Dr. Beto Cabezas, Luis’ brother, said his grandfather imparted some core values around honesty and hard work. “But what he lacked was an awakening,” says Dr. Beto, as he presents himself, about how to improve his lot in life. “How to look a little further.” 

For Dr. Beto, that objective was always in his sights. A doctor by trade, and the head of Bodeguita Don Aurelio which he runs with the help of his son Raúl "Tuta" Cabezas, he commands a presence over his family gatherings, a sort of familial head of state. Dr. Beto relates memories of a rural childhood yearning for progress. As an adolescent, he and his friends would play games of pick up football and then linger as the sun went down chatting and singing along to a guitar. He would tell them his own dreams, and that the only way he thought he could achieve them was through more education. After graduating high school, Dr. Beto and friends hitched a ride to the province of Córdoba, roughly 850 kilometres away, and found an organisation that gave underprivileged students such as himself bursaries to study. Thanks to that financial support, Dr. Beto became a doctor. “For the first time in my life, I felt like we weren’t alone. That the state was accompanying us, which I never felt again.” 

Both brothers learned from Antonio and his wine-making methods. They described him as a generous soul, who divulged some of his secrets, typically rooted in simple techniques. His red wine came to be sought after for its bold characteristics, with a high alcoholic content that helped him steer clear of chemical additives. Antonio urged Luis to stick to simple labels, and his, indeed, emulates the same script as the one used by his uncle, marked simply by each of their names. “If your wine is good, people will buy it,” he would tell him. 

“For me, Antonio was a teacher,” says Rene, who knew Cabezas’ family since he was a child, and as an adult was one of the  main people who helped him make his wine. “People would come from all over the country looking for his wine,” he says. “You had to do your work properly so that the wine would turn out right.” 

“There was a lot of him in his bottles,” adds Heredia, the photographer. “Because it was totally manual, so it took him a lot of time.” And while he found success in his own production, and was even called upon to contribute to creating a wine for Pope Francis, Antonio participated in more local collective ventures, adding a portion of his harvest to the wine cooperative Trassoles that made a communal batch intended to help more producers earn a living. “He saw himself as very tiny,” says Heredia.

Like many settlements along the shore of human history, the community of Cafayate sprung up around water. The origins of that lifeline stretch 185 km north, and a mountain called the Nevado de Acay, 5,750 metres above sea level. The Calchaquí River begins there, as a humble trickle out of the Andes, growing and gaining strength as it courses through the province of Salta, changing name and eventually connecting with el Río de la Plata and the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, watery branches spear out of Calchaquí, like the Río Chuscha, which supplies water to the town of Cafayate, and its wine industry, big and small. 

Cafayate, a word that has origins in the languages of the Aymara and Quechua peoples, is located at the intersection of two water basins. 

“They say that the rivers come every 50 years,” says Miguel Terraza, a small wine producer in the Calchaqui valley. When the river swells and the water crests over its footprint, it reconfigures the landscape, plucking boulders from higher up the range and depositing them lower down. “It’s an untameable river, because it drags you, it embraces you completely.”

And for people like Terraza, it is shockingly elusive. For years, his small scale wine operation on land that he inherited from his father, and his father before him, barely had enough water to survive. The privately-owned water consortium opens up little gates from a canal of water emanating from a local river. Terraza gets six hours of water for his plants, once every 22 days, or a bit longer if the water day lands on the weekend. But thanks to funding from the Swiss government that brought a water source to the area after it discovered that local families had none, Terraza and other small producers have piggy-backed on that piece of infrastructure, installing a drip irrigation system that they use at night, when the community doesn’t require the water. Over the years, the small producers have also eked out two spots on the water consortium commission, which means that their voices are heard among the decision-making body dominated by the big producers. Now, if there is excess water because of a big rainfall, for example, small producers like Terraza can haggle for more access.  

“If we had more water, we might be able to expand,” he notes. 

Terraza’s 2,000 vines face north, to take advantage of the trajectory of the sun. The gusting mountain air “helps us, because it keeps bacteria that might attack the plants far away.” His story is also about family legacy. His grandfather planted vines, and his father worked at the Bodega Etchart, an important family-run estancia. When he was between 17 and 19 years old, Terraza joined his father at the plantation, walking the six kilometres before the sun was up to work in the fields.  “He used to tell me to learn how to make wine, because this soil is very fertile,” he says. His plan was to work for the Etchart family for three years, but in the blink of an eye, 40 years went by. He would come home after 8 hours of work, and chip away at his own dream, now manifest in his bodega Solín Terraza. The decades at Bodega Etchart enabled Terraza to learn every inch of the wine-making business. He spent years planting seedlings, cutting vines in the fields, scrubbing barrels clean and watching how the production unfolded.  

“The good thing is that now I can make wine that belongs to me,” he says. His plants average about one litre of wine each per harvest, which means he produces about 2,000 litres a year.

Industrial wineries have a system of refrigeration that keeps the wine cold throughout its process of fermentation. But in small establishments like Terraza’s, artisanal methods are also employed. “I harvest the reds at the first hour of the morning to take advantage of the cold of the night, which benefits me,” he says. “So we’re out cutting grapes at 6 a.m.” He doesn’t add yeast throughout the process, relying instead on the natural bacteria that are produced days after the grapes are harvested. That’s another reason why he times his haul specifically for early morning, so that the fermentation process occurs inside the bodega, and not under the beating sun of mid day as the harvesting is unfolding. He adds a dash of sulfite after the fermentation is complete to help preserve his product. 

Thanks to a collective organisation called Unidos en La Ceiba, Terraza and other small producers were able to source fermentation and storage containers, along with a wine crusher - all tools that enabled each family to scale up their production. He shows off his modest operation, in a bodega built with adobe to keep temperatures down, and wooden barrels that were bought second hand from the biggest bodegas. On the wall are awards his wines won in 2010, 2018 and 2019. The first prize, for his 2010 Malbec awarded by a competition in the province of San Juan, he learned about on the radio. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “Those tiny things make you think that you’re on a good path.”

This unity among small producers has been one of the driving motivations for Sacha Haro Galli, whose UTAMA vineyard is located in an area known as Banda de Arriba. Sacha, who has participated in projects led by another cooperative, Trassoles, has advocated for shared machinery and local fairs to help buttress the ingenuity of the small producer – those who used the old technique of crushing grapes with their feet, or a sack of onions and a rock as a wine press.

For him, competition is not a problem. To the contrary, the diversity and variety of many small wine producers enriches everyone, both in cultural and productive terms. 

“If I stick a shovel in here, there are worms everywhere. And it’s not that we’re in the humid pampa,” says Sacha. He’s crouched close to the ground, sifting through the earth that he and his wife Giselle have helped make fertile. After Antonio Cabezas, there is perhaps no person more associated with motivating the small-scale producer in the valley as Sacha, a luminous soul who radiates a deep connection to the territory.

He inherits this love from his father, Emilio Haro Galli, a painter, sculptor, ceramist who along with his ex partner, Maud Rouppe, imparted on their children a love of art, land, and collective wellbeing. The family’s quarter hectare vineyard of Torrontés and cabernet grapes took a few years to get off the ground. But the land has lessons, if you listen. Now, Sacha, who is also a ceramist and sculptor, recites the natural remedies that allow their production to flourish, and produce 3000 bottles a year. This year, they took a drastic decision to change the formation of the plant, from a squat one known in Spanish as “espaldero,” to the more ancient “parral” method that guides the vine to expand into a roof of foliage that protects the grape bunches from the sun. 

“It so happens we’re in a renewal year,” says Sacha. The renewal requires some violence, sawing off the plant’s branches so that just a main trunk is left standing. A paste consisting of cow dung, clay, ground up eggshells and a fermented tea of the herb shavegrass (cola de caballo) is applied along the length of the trunk, as a sort of rejuvenating balm.

A long-term vision has driven the family Humano, too. Their Inicios wine is one of the burgeoning brands in the valley. Jorge Humano, his sister Raquel, with the help of their four younger siblings, have shaped its offerings. “We were always employees,” said Raquel Humano, a French teacher, tourism guide, and local elected representative. And they were always surrounded by vineyards -in front of their house, on the way to school or work. Their grandfather planted vines, and their father worked at the bodega Etchart. So, the decision to break out and start their own venture felt natural, and was an attempt at building something new for their family. It took five years for production to start in earnest. Their first years, without a vehicle to rely on, they would transport the grapes they had purchased for production on bicycle. Now, Jorge Humano has left his other job and dedicates himself entirely to wine production. 

“To progress, to be able to live better through that,” he says of his motivation. “We always had the knowledge,” adds Raquel, who is studying to be a sommelier. “To make something that has your last name on it, that is very satisfying.” While part of the younger generation of producers in the area, they too have become mentors for up and comers, who turn to them for advice and guidance on how to start their own ventures. 

Part of the growth is also due to new regulations that recognises artisanal wine and permits its sale. Sacha says in the last few years, some 100 new local wine producers have registered with the National Institute of Vitiviniculture of Argentina.

“Like Antonio Cabezes en Tolombón, Valle Calchaquies, there are many Antonio Cabezas in rural areas that love the earth, and take care of their vineyards, and make their wines,” says Lucia Bulacio. She has spent the last several years raising awareness and nurturing the fertile natural and artisanal wine industry in Argentina. 

For her, natural wine is an act of communion – with the land, and with the humans who stick their hands into it to create something new. She discovered natural wine during a trip to Spain in 2016, and in 2018 she started making her own. Her production is nomadic. She visits natural wine producers, lives with them, helps with their harvest, and carves out a little corner to make her own. During the pandemic, she noticed a newfound interest in natural wine – people considering what they consumed and where it came from more carefully. After opening her store, Lado Salvaje, in Buenos Aires in 2021, she launched Feria Salvaje, Argentina’s most important natural wine fair, bringing producers from across the country to share and sell their creations and create a network among each other. 

“The landscape is not only what we can see like earth, sky, climate and grapes, but it’s also the person who is behind it, the context, and how they live,” she says. 

She is quick to point out that the baseline for wine should be “natural” – which is to say: “wine in the era of Jesus was made in a natural way” and then massification and industrialisation turned it from a product that was about sustenance, into an alcoholic beverage. Even now, the term natural can come with certain controversy. In general, it is water and juice that ferments with natural yeasts. But some people may allow for more flexibility in its production, depending on the climate conditions. A rainy season that may throw the chemical balance of a crop off could require a certain intervention, some say, while others insist that the production needs to be a reflection of the environment of that year. “I’m not extremist,” she says. “I would rather speak about consciousness, respect and coherence. For natural wine, the most important thing is what you are going to leave behind in this life” – how you treat the earth and the environment that made your interpretation of those ingredients possible.

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August is a month to give thanks in Valle Calchaquíes. All around the valley, families gather to perform ceremonies that venerate the earth, la Pachamama, all that it brought them, and to ask it for good fortune in the year ahead. For the family of Dr. Beto Cabezas, it is an event of great preparation, when some 100 family and friends descend on their vineyard to break bread, eat locro, and watch traditional dances. Before the feast, comes mother earth. Beto Cabezas’s son, Raul, who is in charge of Bodeguita Don Aurelio now with his wife Natalia, open up the pit that was the site of veneration last year. He digs up bottles of wine that had been buried under the earth, and sets them aside, next to a spread of more than a dozen bowls, filled with grains, nuts, cigarettes, rice, stew other goods that will be sprinkled or poured back into the ground. Beto crouches, and opens up a bottle of wine to sip. 

“It’s a delicious Mistela, a lot better than before, because it was underground,” he says into a microphone. Then he pours some into the ground. “That we never want for the essentials,” he says. “That mother earth help us with another beautiful production this year.” 

And then one by one, everyone at the celebration makes their own offerings. 

For them, as for many people in the valley, the wine making tradition is about legacy – cultivating the culture and connection to land that bonds people to this landscape, for the next generation. 

“We have a lot of richness that we can share,” says Sacha.