A Report From Wine Explorer Diego Samper
Paris, France
Thirty years ago, a bet on an empty beach in Nicaragua became a $1.5 million address.
I was re-reading Bill Bonner’s story about Rancho Santana this week. Back then, it was raw. No paved roads. No restaurants. No polished villas. Just a watchman in a hammock overlooking a mile of Pacific coast.
The first buyers paid around $150,000 for oceanfront lots. They dealt with floods, outages, bad roads, and water shortages. They built slowly. They figured it out as they went.
And they had, as Bill wrote, the time of their lives.
The Time of Our Lives… Big Chan…
Today, Rancho Santana is refined. Award-winning. Comfortable.
The next generation inherits something beautiful.
But it is not the same thing as discovering it.
Another Ranch
As I finished the piece, I thought about another ranch.
Right now, in Salta, the lower parts of the Calchaquí Valley are beginning their harvest. Mornings are cold. The light is sharp. Crews move early before the sun takes over.
At Rancho Gualfín, we are still early.
There have been fewer than ten vintages of Tacana.
Less than ten.
That is not branding. It is geography. There is not enough water up there to make it otherwise. The vineyard gives what it can give. No more.
Some Tacana vintages are already gone. Opened. Shared. Finished. They will never return.
Others sit quietly in cellars. Still alive. Still evolving.
Real things have limits.
And limits create memory.
Finite Things
One day, my son will grow up in a world that is smoother than this one. Almost anything will be available instantly. Labels will be familiar. Everything rated and optimized.
What I hope he remembers is not convenience.
I hope he remembers that some bottles did not come back.
That wine was tied to a year, a harvest, a stretch of land that could only give so much.
That wine, like time, is finite.
Tacana is the root.
Through it, you sit at tables that stretch beyond one ranch, one valley, one country, France, Spain, Argentina, Italy. Producers who farm small plots and bottle under their own names. Wines that taste like somewhere.
You are not buying volume.
You are participating early.
Building the First Generation
This is how we build first generations.
Not by scaling endlessly.
By choosing carefully.
By inviting the right people.
So here is your privilege as a member.
If you open a bottle, whether it is Tacana or one of the producers we source from abroad, and someone across the table leans in and says, “Where did you find this?” bring them.
We will chip in $25 for each of you toward their first shipment into the club.
Not as a promotion.
As a way of building this the same way Rancho Santana was built.
That stretch of coast in Nicaragua became valuable because a small group of people believed in it before it was obvious. They dealt with dust, outages, and bad roads. They showed up early.
They had the time of their lives.
The Time of Our Lives… Big Chan…
Up in Salta, there will never be enough water to make Tacana endless.
Finite land.
Finite harvests.
Finite time.
Tacana will always be limited.
The table does not have to be.
We are not building scale.
We are building alignment, a group of like-minded people who understand that the best discoveries rarely arrive fully paved.
Let’s build this the same way.
One table at a time.
Diego Samper
Wine Explorer
