The Coffee Girl, the Dirt Floor & the Gringita Hand

Alice L'Estrange's story begins not in a vineyard but in a university lecture hall in Australia, where she met her future business partner Lucy Kendall over a bottle of Savagnin from Anton Von Klopper at Lucy Margaux. Alice was studying for a master's of agricultural science; Lucy was finishing her master's in viticulture and oenology. But Alice had a different calling. She quit her master's to learn Spanish, determined to communicate directly with coffee and grape growers in the Americas. For the next eight years, she worked as a green coffee professional at Small Batch Coffee, travelling across Central and South America sourcing direct-trade specialty coffee, building relationships with farmers, and learning the language of soil, altitude, and terroir.

In 2014, Alice and Lucy founded Cultivar Fine Wines — an Australian importing company with a radical brief: to find "somewhere unknown, underestimated… somewhere with surprising wines that we could carve a little niche with." They started in Argentina, got "smashed in the face with big-bodied, oaky Malbecs," and crossed the Andes to Chile. What they found changed everything: centuries-old bush vines of País and Moscatel de Alejandría, dry-farmed by small farmers in the Itata and Bío-Bío valleys, making wines that tasted like nothing the export market had ever seen. Cultivar became the first importer to bring these wines to Australia — building a portfolio of Roberto Henríquez, Cacique Maravilla, Leonardo Erazo, Mauricio González, Viña Maitia, and others.

But importing was not enough. Alice wanted to make. In 2019, she moved to Guarilihue — a tiny town in the heart of the Itata Valley — and set up shop in a dirt-floor bodega shared with Ignacio Pino Román. She called her label Strange Grapes — a nod to the weird, wonderful varieties that industrial Chile had forgotten. She began working with Sergio Parra at Los Chorillos, Eliana Sanhueza, and other small growers — convincing them, as one importer noted, "by a combination of persuasion and cold hard pesos" to abandon chemicals and embrace organic, no-till, regenerative farming. For Alice, wine was never a product; it was a relationship with land and people.

Alice L'Estrange's winemaking is a direct extension of her coffee background: source carefully, intervene minimally, and let the raw material speak. She is not afraid of weirdness — her wines are sometimes reductive on opening, sometimes funky, sometimes murky — but they are always honest, alive, and deeply drinkable. Her philosophy is one of radical transparency and sustainability: repurposed glass bottles, recyclable sugar-cane corks, artist-designed labels, and a refusal to polish away the character that makes natural wine worth drinking.

The cellar is a model of intentional simplicity. Grapes are hand-harvested and fully destemmed using the zaranda — a traditional bamboo screen that leaves a lot of whole berries intact. Fermentations happen in open-top vats with indigenous yeasts and no temperature control. Some wines see extended skin contact — the Pastiche spends a month on skins, then ages sous voile (under a veil of flor yeast) for months, developing a distinctive saline, nutty, savoury complexity. Others are pressed early and aged in stainless steel or old Raulí foudres — the native Chilean beech wood used for centuries before French oak arrived. Sulphur is minimal — 25ppm at most, and often none at all.

What distinguishes Alice's wines is their personality and unpredictability. The Pastiche is "reductive and weird on opening, with air over a couple of days it becomes quite unique." The Barrica Rica is "plump and juicy but with ultra-fine almost silty tannins." The Perro Negro is "juicy, bright and oh so refreshing." And La Cargadora is "a little gruff and earthy, but in the best possible way." These are not wines made to please a focus group; they are wines made to express a place, a moment, and a relationship. As one importer put it: "For the feint and not so feint of heart."

Alice L'Estrange is not merely a winemaker; she is a bridge — between the coffee farms of Central America and the vineyards of Southern Chile, between the import desk in Melbourne and the dirt floor in Guarilihue, between the industrial wine machine and the regenerative future. In an era when Chilean wine was defined by export volume, corporate consolidation, and the erasure of smallholder farming, Alice demonstrated that the most profound wines sometimes come from a 200-year-old País vine in Itata, destemmed by hand through a bamboo screen, aged sous voile in a dirt-floor bodega, and bottled in repurposed glass with a sugar-cane cork. It is largely thanks to her work — first as an importer with Cultivar, then as a winemaker with Strange Grapes — that Itata, Bío-Bío, and the heritage varieties of Southern Chile now have a place in the global natural wine conversation.

The legacy of Strange Grapes is the legacy of the gringita hand in Chilean viticulture. Alice is not a typical Chilean winemaker: she is an Australian who quit her master's to learn Spanish, spent eight years sourcing coffee, co-founded an importing company from a university friendship born over a bottle of Savagnin, and moved to a tiny town in the Itata Valley to make wine on a dirt floor. She stepped into a patriarchal world of rural southern Chile — a world of small farmers, ancient vines, and traditional methods — and did not just create a space for herself; she created a space for regenerative agriculture, fair trade, and artistic collaboration. She pays her growers well. She convinces them to abandon chemicals. She uses repurposed glass and sugar-cane corks. And she makes wines that are weird, wonderful, and unmistakably honest.

The future of the project is tied to the future of regenerative viticulture and natural wine in Southern Chile — to the growing recognition that the best wines come not from the most famous appellations but from the most committed guardians of ancient, dry-farmed vines. As Pastiche continues to set the benchmark for sous-voile orange wine in Chile, as Barrica Rica proves that 200-year-old País can produce reds of real finesse, as Perro Negro shows that natural wine can be joyful and accessible, and as La Cargadora demonstrates that Cinsault aged under flor can be gruff, earthy, and delightful, Alice L'Estrange remains what she has always intended to be: a coffee girl from Australia who found her home in the dirt floors of Guarilihue — not to sell wines, but to build relationships. With growers. With dogs. With soil. And with the strange, beautiful grapes that industrial Chile tried to forget.