Arnaud Faupin Vinos Naturales

The winery

Arnaud Faupin Vinos Naturales is a small vineyard in Coirón, in the municipality of Salamanca, in the upper part of the Choapa Valley, at about 900 meters and surrounded by dry, stony hills. The property, originally called Hijuelas Buillemore, slopes gently down from a rise to the south bank of the Choapa River. The project was started in 2000 by the Scotsman George Manson, who sold his wines under the Domaine de Manson label; later the winemaker Arnaud Faupin bought the already planted vines and devoted them entirely to natural wine. On labels and in registers the winery also appears as Viña Alpa or Vitivinícola Alpa.

It is just a few hectares (two, according to the producer's own presentation at RAW Wine) yielding on the order of 8,000 bottles a year. Its most original trait is that all the work, in the vineyard and in the cellar, is done by hand and without electricity: Faupin stripped the motors from his machines and replaced them with bicycles to crush the grapes and move the wine. Fermentations are spontaneous, the wines are neither fined nor filtered and carry very little sulfite. He works Syrah, Viognier, Carménère and Pedro Jiménez, with a little Garnacha and Mourvèdre for the blends, and names his wines after local birds, flowers and places: Sturnella, Pequén and Tricahue (Syrah), Turca (Carménère), Azahar (Pedro Jiménez), Añañuca (Viognier) and Chalinga, his blend. The most singular is Jaune [ZON], a Viognier that spent eight years in barrel under a veil of yeast and in 2020 received a gold medal and the title of best natural wine in Chile at the Catad'Or competition.

Visits are arranged by prior booking on WhatsApp (+56 9 8950 0434) or Instagram (@arnaudfaupin). During the year he offers tours with tasting and a wine-and-stargazing option that adds the Choapa night sky, with no published prices. The busiest date is the Fiesta de la Vendimia, the harvest festival he has held every harvest season since at least 2023: in 2026 it ran on three Saturdays between February and March, from 16:00 to 22:00, with admission at CLP 50,000 and room for 40 people, and included picking, traditional zarandeo (destemming the grapes by hand over a wooden grate), hand-bottling a bottle of your own, painting labels with wine lees, a cocktail with tasting and stargazing. No restaurant, accommodation or online shop is announced; the most direct way to get his wines is to write to the producer, and in Santiago his Syrah Pequén is on the list at the Normandie brasserie in Providencia.