The Clay Vessel, the Full Moon & the Friend Called Bango
On the Madrid slope of the Sierra de Gredos, Eduardo Muñoz — a former energy-sector expat who learned wine at the Spanish embassy in Argentina and in the qvevri cellars of Georgia — tends a single 1.5-hectare vineyard of 60-to-90-year-old Garnacha, Chelva, Airén and Teta de Vaca on decomposed granite. He harvests at night under the full moon, foot-treads in 400-litre vats, ferments in clay amphorae recovered from local farmers, adds nothing at all, and makes around 2,500 bottles a year that he describes as films with many agents.
Origin — From Embassy Corridors to a Buried Qvevri
Eduardo Muñoz did not arrive at wine by the usual road. Madrileño, he spent years leading energy and construction projects in Africa for a Spanish multinational and was working at the Spanish embassy in Argentina when the wine found him. "Me di cuenta de que el vino te puede hacer sentir un lugar" — I realised that wine can make you feel a place, he says. From there the path ran through Slow Food, a sommelier course in 2014, and a decision that would have seemed absurd on paper: he left the company and went to tend a vineyard in Chapinería, the Gredos village of his childhood summers.
Then came Georgia — four times. Georgia, in Eduardo's telling, is the cradle of wine, where they have been making it the same way for six thousand years and never stopped. It was on a return flight from Tbilisi that the project found its name: a friend who works for Georgia's National Wine Agency told him that in old Georgian, "chapi" means "clay vessel." The word united the origins of wine with his own — and echoed his childhood in Chapinería. The day people started calling him "Chapi," believing it was a nickname, he understood the project had a life of its own, and that the wine was generating a story bigger than he was.
The founding gesture was a ceremony. For his first solo wine, in 2020, Eduardo chose the grape that would become his obsession — Chelva, a variety ignored and despised, which gave him freedom to experiment without the pressure of an expected result — and, with the help of friends, buried a clay vessel in his garden to emulate the Georgian qvevri, with the Georgian ambassador officiating. The wine that emerged was, he says, very expressive — "con demasiadas historias a la vez," too many stories at once. His wines today are more paused, more reflective: still expressive, but no longer trying to tell everything at once. Winemaking began in 2020; 2022 was the third harvest.
The Place — Gredos, and a Vineyard Nobody Wanted
Gredos is not an easy place. It is Eduardo's childhood, and it took him an adult's return to accept it: "Creía conocerlo, pero nunca deja de sorprenderme con nuevos matices bajo su aparente austeridad." I thought I knew it, but it never stops surprising me with new nuances beneath its apparent austerity. The Sierra de Gredos — granite spine, high altitude, brutal winters and demanding summers — is where Madrid's natural wine vignerons have staked their claim, and where no settled style yet exists. That openness is the opportunity.
One & a Half Hectares of Granite & Sand
The vineyard is 1.5 hectares, leased, facing southeast, on decomposed granite and sand — the Gredos signature that gives Garnacha its fine, floral, mineral register. The vines average 60 years old, some more than 90, a multivarietal planting where red grapes — primarily Garnacha — grow mixed with whites (Airén and Chelva) and the pink-skinned Teta de Vaca. A single field, four voices, the old Gredos way.
The Night Harvest Under the Full Moon
Grapes are harvested by hand at night in late August, under the full moon — letting the dark and the altitude's chill do the work of a cooling truck. In the garage winery — "our garage," as the Raisin listing says with a shrug — the fruit rests overnight to avoid any overheating, and is then foot-trodden in 400-litre vats. Racking and bottling follow the lunar calendar. Some neighbours smile. The wines do not care.
Recovering What Two Generations Made
The project's second pillar, beside the semi-abandoned vineyard, is clay itself: Eduardo ferments in old amphorae recovered from local farmers — tinajas in which wine was made two generations ago, before steel and before fashion. The equipment list is a poem of modesty: old amphorae, 54-litre demijohns, one 500-litre stainless tank. The vessels came from the village; the wine goes back to the village's bars.
Chelva, the Fetish Grape
Of all the varieties in the mixed rows, Chelva became Eduardo's uva fetiche — a white grape of the Madrid-Gredos zone long ignored and despised, which made it the perfect laboratory: "era ignorada y despreciada, lo que me daba libertad para experimentar sin la presión de un resultado esperado." Ignored and despised — which gave me the freedom to experiment without the pressure of an expected result. Freedom, in Eduardo's world, is always the point.
Winemaking — "Minimal Intervention Is a Myth"
Eduardo has no patience for the founding myth of natural wine. "La mínima intervención es un mito. Intervenimos siempre, pero lo importante no es la ausencia de acción, sino cómo actuamos: con atención, respeto y sin artificios. Cada decisión — tomarla o no — marca un rumbo distinto." Minimal intervention is a myth. We always intervene; what matters is not the absence of action but how we act — with attention, respect, and without artifice. Every decision, including the decision not to make one, sets a different course.
The discipline that follows is total: the wines are never corrected, and not a single gram of sulphites is added — spontaneous fermentations run on yeasts from the vineyard itself. The manual labour is uncompromising: foot-treading, hand-pressing, and for the ancestral-method bottles, disgorging, chilling and refilling each bottle one by one — hours of work for a few dozen bottles, a methodology found, he says, only through trial and error. What looks like refusal is in fact a different kind of precision.
And it is a spiritual practice. From his travels in Latin America, Eduardo learned from indigenous communities that objects and places are alive and transmit energy — a cosmovision that shapes his cellar. He describes his role as a conductor of an orchestra: listen, interpret, guide, let each element find its own voice. The bubble that runs through his wines — Bango, Bubbles, almost all of them — is for him not a technique but a symbol: patience, living energy, union, connection. "Captar ese flujo y dejarlo manifestarse con libertad es lo que da sentido a mi trabajo." To catch that flow and let it manifest freely is what gives my work meaning.
The Wines — Films in Bottles
The range changes with the vintages and the stories — each bottle a small film with many agents. The through-lines: old vines on granite, spontaneous fermentations in recovered clay, the ancestral sparkle, and labels designed to unite worlds. Production hovers around 2,500 bottles a year, and Eduardo intends to keep it there.
Chapi Bubbles
Ancestral sparkling — 40% Chelva, 60% Airén, GredosThe luminous, expansive one — an ancestral-method fizz of Chelva and Airén, bottled mid-fermentation, disgorged by hand bottle by bottle. Orchard fruit, white flowers and mountain herbs over fine, natural spritz: the calling card of the Gredos night harvest, and the bottle that most often converts the sceptic. Zero sulphites, vineyard yeasts, the full moon in the calendar.
Bango
Ancestral red — Cariñena & Garnacha, GredosThe heart of the project — a Priorat-style coupage of Cariñena and Garnacha, macerated with fig leaves to reach towards chimbango, the ancestral Peruvian drink — "entre Priorat y Perú," tropical nose and mineral mouth. Bango honours a cousin who died, with whom Eduardo toasted dreams like the ones now coming true in Gredos. One critic called it celebratory yet deeply delicate — a tension between lightness and depth that makes it impossible to forget. The bottle that stole the interviewer's heart. Zero sulphites.
Chapi Roots
Natural red — Garnacha, GredosThe root — Garnacha from the old mixed rows, the wine of earth and memory, of the idea that a root does not weigh: it holds. More introspective than Bubbles, more grounded than Mood, Roots connects directly with the recovered vineyard and the recovered tinajas — wine as the village's own archive, made from what its grandparents planted and its farmers stored. Foot-trodden, amphora-fermented, nothing added.
Mood
Natural red — GredosThe introspective one — changing, almost emotional in the glass: a wine that reads differently every time, the way moods do. Where Bubbles expands and Roots anchors, Mood wanders — the wine that most clearly shows Eduardo's belief that a bottle should be a conversation, not a statement. Spontaneous fermentation, clay vessels, zero sulphites.
Mar & Chapi Juice
The rituals — GredosThe edges of the map. Mar — "sea" — is Eduardo's condensing wine, built in interlocking layers like a puzzle, a liquid ritual converging his Georgian and Latin American learnings: un ritual líquido que deja espacio a lo que no se puede controlar, a liquid ritual that leaves room for what cannot be controlled, transforming absence into presence. Chapi Juice, the first wine of the project, is a lightly sparkling rosé from the estate's mixed rows — the playful ancestor of everything since. Small lots, gone when gone.
Legacy — Building Gredos' Identity, Bottle by Bottle
Chapi Wines matters because it is one of the founding stones of Madrid's natural wine scene — among the first projects to emerge from the Chapinería–San Martín de Valdeiglesias axis that now anchors the capital's vignerons. When Eduardo began, there was no fixed style for natural Gredos wine; that absence was precisely the attraction. His wager — light, permeable wines, deeply connected to ancestral heritage, made from recovered old vineyards with recovered old vessels — has helped give the zone an identity other regions take decades to find.
The legacy is collective. Chapi Wines was never a solo act: it is, by its own definition, a community of friends — the ones who buried the qvevri in the garden, who harvest by night, who disgorge bottles one by one. Eduardo helped organise Now in Gredos, the fair he and his fellow vignerons launched in 2023: more than forty growers from Madrid, across Spain, Italy, Slovenia and Georgia, joined by debates on biodiversity, climate change and wine law, street food from five continents, and DJs playing under the moon. A fair, in other words, built exactly like his wine: many agents, one shared energy.
The legacy is also philosophical — unusually articulate for so small a cellar. Eduardo's creed — that minimal intervention is a myth, that the winemaker is a conductor rather than a creator, that the bubble is a symbol of union, that a "weird" wine is a wine with identity — gives the Gredos movement its most quotable voice. And his refusal of scale is principled: around 2,500 bottles a year, balanced against his other projects, with a declared end-condition — the day the freedom to create with coherence is lost, the project will cease to make sense.
And the legacy is geographical and emotional at once: a man who felt places through wine at an embassy in Argentina, and came home to make a place feelable for others. Chapinería gave him its name, its granite, its despised Chelva and its buried tinajas; he gave it back films in bottles — Bango toasting a cousin, Roots holding the ground, a qvevri sleeping in a garden under the full moon. "Si entiendes el vino como arte, debe existir ese vínculo emocional", his neighbour in this series said. Eduardo Muñoz lives the same sentence, one clay vessel at a time.