A Report From Wine Explorer Diego Samper
Manizales, Colombia
He pulled a bottle from his own cellar, a Tinto Pesquera, label faded and dust clinging to the glass.
“Give them this one,” he said. “Made before wine became an industry.”
We were both still students then, broke but curious. Our friends were getting married and wanted “books and wine.” We had little to give. Her father, a lawyer with a strong handshake, a thick mustache, and a stare that could guarantee a solid defense in any courtroom, disappeared into his cellar and came back holding that bottle.
He was a Real Madrid superfan, a member of a flamenco tablao, a bullfighting enthusiast, and the proud owner of a Jaguar that snarled through Madrid’s narrow streets. He liked his cigars, his ham, and his wine. To my eyes, that was as Spanish as you could get.
Though I was the foreigner at his family table, he treated me as an equal. That night he poured the Pesquera, and we talked late into the night. Olive oil smell in the air. “Good wine is patient,” he said. “Like good people.”
The girlfriend is long gone. The bottle is gone. The lesson stayed.
Spain does not rush. The country still runs on human time. Lunch lasts two hours. Conversations spill into the afternoon. The people are proud, stubborn, and alive. And the wines carry that same heartbeat.
This Spanish Collection took me nearly four years to put together. Not because finding wine is hard, but because I wanted bottles that fit perfectly and were ready to drink.
Each one comes from someone who makes wine the slow way. The way that lawyer from Madrid would have respected.
In Ribera del Duero, Bodegas 41N makes wine with the precision of scientists and the soul of farmers. They once created a wine for the European Space Program, which I thought was very cool. Their Vendimia Seleccionada 2016 comes from vines at 900 meters and is aged a year in new French oak. Only 8,400 bottles exist. It is Ribera with its shirt sleeves rolled up, dark fruit, spice, and tension.
In La Mancha, Elías López Montero of Verum ignores oak and returns to clay. His Las Tinadas Cencibel 2022 ferments in amphorae, the way Romans once did. Smooth, earthy, alive. Fewer than 10,000 bottles made from seventy-year-old vines.
In Toro, Bodegas Félix Sanz makes Vocablos 2019, a fierce Tinta de Toro from vines older than memory. The soil burns in summer and freezes in winter. The wine is muscular, honest, and rare, only 5,120 bottles.
Then there is Pesquera’s MXI 2021. The same family that changed Ribera del Duero half a century ago still runs the show. Fifty years later, they have not softened. They have refined. 36,000 bottles made.
In the granite hills outside Madrid, Marañones 2022 offers a pure, organic Garnacha that smells of wind and stone. About 10,000 bottles. And in Almansa, Dominio de Casalta’s Sorrasca 2019 gives you a dark, brooding Petit Verdot from a single limestone hectare at 1,000 meters. Just 4,000 bottles.
Six wines. Six stories. Together, about 73,500 bottles for the whole world. One industrial winery can hold that much in a single steel tank. Our entire collection would not fill it halfway.
That is what buying small really means. Not prestige. Not luxury. Attention.
When you work at this scale, nothing slips past you. Every decision shows in the glass.
Big companies like Gallo, Constellation, and Trinchero make or import good, affordable wines. They are engineers of consistency. But these winemakers are the ones who keep wine human. They make it for family tables, not for supermarket shelves.
When you drink their wine, you taste their patience, their stubbornness, and their belief that wine should still taste like somewhere.
The bottles in this collection are finally here. They survived tariffs, shipping delays, and border inspections. I’ll be saving a few extra for myself, but I’m proud to share the rest with our members.
If you are not yet part of the club, this is the moment to join. These bottles will not appear on store shelves or in any other collection. Once they are gone, they are gone.
Join us, pour a glass, and taste wine made before it became an industry.
A tu salud,
Diego Samper
Wine Explorer
