Tinto de Rulo

The winery

Tinto de Rulo was born in 2013 as the project of three friends, agronomists from Maule and Biobío, and today it is led by Claudio Contreras, a native of Los Ángeles, and Jaime Pereira. The name plays on the word rulo, what Chilean country people call dry-farmed land, and sums up the idea behind the project: rescuing the country wine of the south, the kind made by hand for generations from old, unirrigated vines. They own no vineyards; they work in partnership with small growers who tend old dry-farmed vines on granitic soils at around 300 meters above sea level: País from Yumbel for the pipeño (the young country wine of the south), Malbec from San Rosendo with vines around 140 years old, a blend of Malbec and País from the same source, and Carignan from Loncomilla, in Maule. According to their importers, they also buy grapes in the Itata Valley.

The grapes are destemmed by hand and ferment spontaneously, with native yeasts, in old raulí-wood lagares (treading vats) and clay tinajas (amphorae), with daily punch-downs for about three weeks. The wines then rest for close to a year in well-used oak barrels, while the País pipeño is kept in restored raulí casks; they are bottled without corrections and with very little sulfur dioxide. Production is small, on the order of 1,200 cases a year, with runs of one thousand to three thousand five hundred bottles per wine. Tinto de Rulo belongs to Sur Natural, the group of natural-wine producers from Itata and Biobío, and its wines have been exported to the United States, the United Kingdom and Brazil.

The cellar is on the road to El Olivo, in the municipality of Los Ángeles, but it publishes no visiting program or opening hours, has no online store, and its website is out of service. The most direct way to get to know the wines is to write on Instagram (@tintoderulo), where the winery shows its harvests and collaborations, or call +56 9 9458 3578 to ask where to find them.