Viña Wayra - Vientos del Choapa

The winery

Wayra means wind in Quechua, and the place itself chose the name: a property of about two hectares in the Punta del Pavo area of Coirón, at close to a thousand meters in the Choapa Valley, where gusts shake the vines almost every day. It is worked by Mónica Alejandra Molina, a photographer by trade who came to the valley for work, stayed and bought a plot with pisco-grape vines. As that fruit was going to waste, around 2015 she began turning it into wine with her mother; over the years other women in the family joined in, and today the project presents itself as a winery made by women. For years they worked without electricity, treading the white grapes and destemming the reds by hand, until in 2022 they installed solar panels with support from the Ponle Energía a tu Pyme program; INDAP, the national agricultural development agency, has in turn helped them with a reservoir to store water and with their presence at fairs and competitions.

The vines grow beside a hill with petroglyphs that the family attributes to cultures such as the Molle, the Diaguita and the Inca, and several wines take their names from those carvings: Camélido, a Petit Verdot with more than a year in second-use French oak barrels, refers to a figure that may be a guanaco; Cheuzeca, a Syrah, to a mask that evokes an owl; and Meica, a sweet late-harvest red, to the figure of the healer. The line is completed by the Syrah and the Carménère under the Wayra label, and in the 2026 harvest they also made a Cabernet Franc. These are very small batches, between 225 and 1,000 liters per wine according to the entry sheets of the Catad'Or competition, where the winery has won gold medals in 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2024.

Wayra has no website or online shop: its wines are bought at the property itself, by WhatsApp at +56 9 3118 7602, by Instagram message and at small-producer wine fairs and farmers' markets in the region. In 2026 the family invited people through social media to visit the winery, walk around it and buy direct, and the wine route proposed by the Salamanca Tourism Office includes it with a tasting in the mountains and a view of the petroglyphs. As there are no published hours or prices, arrange the visit in advance by WhatsApp. The property lies between Coirón and Tranquilla, near Ruta D-825, upstream from Salamanca.