Luca Hodgkinson was born in Priorat to a mixed English, French and Spanish family, from whom he clearly developed both wanderlust and a love of viticulture. After attending oenology school in Toulouse and a Msc. in environmental science in Bordeaux, he travelled around the world working and learning about winemaking, eventually settling in Chile, where he developed a reputation for helping large estates transfer to organic and sustainable viticulture. After years of travel and consulting, Luca co-founded Wildmakers in Chile with JM Sotomayor, focusing on small-scale low intervention wines from diverse sites, mainly from Chile’s Southern Valleys, easily the nation’s most interesting and rich growing areas. These wines brought Luca to international attention and served as his introduction to the Terroir Project, who gave him carte blanche on what to bottle under his label, Vinos Inacayal, meaning “old things,” in Quechua.

The resulting wines are devastatingly simple and delicious examples of why Chile is, dollar for dollar the most interesting wine producing country on Earth, full stop. Each wine is organic, hand harvested and made from a single vineyard field blend. They’re spontaneously fermented, unfined and unfiltered, and only see 20ppm so2 at bottling. La Patugua comes from the centrally located valley of Colchugua and contains gorgeous old vine Semillon, Sauvignon Vert (AKA Friulano) and Moscatel and we plan to drink oceans of it this summer. The red, La Cueva, is a bright and red-fruited blend of ancient Pais and Cabernet Sauvignon from the Southern Valley of Itata, which has long been a hotbed of natural winemaking in Chile.