The Swede, the Magic Mountain & the Rock-Art Laboratory
On Monte Arabí — the magic mountain of Yecla, its slopes carved with prehistoric rock paintings — a tall, wild-looking Swede named Erik Rosdahl made wine in a ruin from 2011 to 2022. No website, no certification, no interviews, no compromise: just old vines at 1,050 metres, buried amphorae, bare feet, hand-drawn labels, and a few thousand bottles a year of such density and elegance that they ended up in three-star restaurants and one legendary 100-point cellar note.
Origin — An Artist Builds a Laboratory in a Ruin
Erik Rosdahl is described by those who met him as an artist, a nomad, and a thoughtful observer — a rather peculiar Swede, tall and wild-looking, who preferred flip-flops even in the Murcian winter and lived in a ruin. He did not arrive in Murcia by chance. Leaving the cold of Sweden was a deliberate decision, a leap into the void in search of authenticity — and in the harsh, sun-struck interior of the Region of Murcia, in the wine country between Jumilla and Yecla, he found it. Around 2011 he began making wine in an area called Hoya de las Torres, on the flanks of Monte Arabí, and under the name Laboratorio Rupestre — the rock-art laboratory, named for the prehistoric engravings that cover the magic mountain — he began producing, with his son Hal, tiny quantities of wine out of a half-ruined house.
The project was never designed to be understood. There was no website, no brand architecture, no certification — the wines carried only Erik's own hand-drawn labels: a fish for Escombro, an ornate hanging lamp strung with a grape bunch for Ruina, a few handwritten words recording the place — laboratorio rupestre, monte arabi, españa — and, where relevant, the quiet parenthetical (no sulfites). He sold directly to the restaurants he liked — Bar Brutal in Barcelona famously carried Escombro — and he poured at natural wine fairs such as Vins Nus, where in 2015 he was listed among the reference producers of additive-free Spain. His first champions were his peers: Laureano Serres of Mendall was the one who first pressed a bottle of Escombro into a stranger's hand in Pinell del Brai.
The wines found their way into some of the most exclusive tables in Europe — his importer conversations, a Dutch tasting host recalls, flowed from life on the farm to the big philosophers to the starred restaurants where he sells his wine directly, "all with a star or two." And then, as deliberately as he came, he left. After the 2022 vintage, Rosdahl stepped away from the winery and moved with his family to a forest in Sweden. It was not a collapse but a continuation — the same refusal to stay in any room longer than the truth requires. The final vintages were bottled into 2025, the last wines drifting out to the world's few remaining allocations.
What remains is one of the strangest and most complete bodies of work in modern Spanish natural wine: a dozen years of old-vine Monastrell, Alicante Bouschet, Syrah, Bobal and Mourvèdre, raised in amphora on a mountain of rock art, made by a man who never once explained himself. "Él mismo no es demasiado complicado al respecto" — he himself is not too complicated about it — as his Dutch host wrote. "He just makes wine."
The Place — Monte Arabí, the Magic Mountain
The vineyards of Laboratorio Rupestre sat in an arid, almost semi-desert landscape high above Yecla, where the climate does half the winemaking: scorching days, cold nights, almost no rain, and poor, stony soils that force the vines to struggle. It is a terroir of extremes — and extremes, concentrated through old vines, are what give these wines their astonishing depth.
1,050 Metres of Gravel & Limestone
Monte Arabí rises to around 1,050 metres, and its vineyards grow in gravelly, highly calcareous soils with scarce rainfall and a dramatic day-night thermal shift — conditions that favour concentration, intensity of flavour and colour while the altitude preserves a spine of freshness. A Spanish taster who visited the zone noted that the wines made here respect the already-defined character of the area: not heavy, despite their power, but fresh and personal.
Vines of 50, 80, 100 Years
Rosdahl worked only with old vineyards — many over fifty years, some up to a hundred — dry-farmed bush vines rooted deep in the limestone. The Bujes plot is two hectares of Monastrell more than a century old, planted at altitude on clay-limestone soil studded with limestone rock. Old vines on poor soil at altitude: the oldest recipe in Spain for grapes of "natural concentration", as one admirer wrote of Escombro — fruit so small and dense it tastes picked with tweezers.
Local Grapes, Uncompromising Integrity
The cellar worked with the region's palette and nothing else: Monastrell, Alicante Bouschet (the teinturier dyeing grape), Syrah, Bobal and Mourvèdre. No certification was ever sought — "without certification but with uncompromising integrity" is how the project is consistently described. The farming followed the same logic as everything else in the laboratory: simple, respectful, ancient. The land was the rulebook; Erik merely enforced it.
A Landscape You Can Taste
Erik liked to say his wines were "para oler y catar" — for smelling and tasting. Each one is a landscape in a bottle: the scorching heat of the day, the cool of the night, the Mediterranean breeze far below, the limestone dust in the air. His Dutch importer reached for Rubens to describe the texture — full-bodied and packed with fruit, yet elegant and silkily soft, "supple like a painting of one of Rubens' females, naked on a chaise longue" — with just enough acidity at the end to keep you drinking.
Winemaking — Tinajas, Bare Hands & the Theatre of Picking
The cellar of Laboratorio Rupestre was a study in subtraction. Erik worked with old tinajas — Spanish clay amphorae — for both fermentation and ageing, vessels that were neutral, ancient, never touched by new or toasted oak. The grapes, from vines of fifty to a hundred years, were harvested entirely by Erik himself, whole-cluster, and allowed to rest before fermenting spontaneously. No commercial yeasts. No filtration. No added sulphites — the labels said so in parentheses, almost shyly. The wines were raised slowly, sometimes for years, until he decided they were done.
His insistence on picking everything with his own hands was not perfectionism but dramaturgy: "Grape picking is like a theatre play. I cannot trust someone to do the picking for me, it would be like having a sick lead actor. It doesn't work, it's out of balance." Harvest, for Erik, was the performance that determined everything after it — the one part of the vintage that could not be delegated, corrected or filtered away. In a buried amphora at the Bujes plot, whole bunches rested six days in two separate lots before spontaneous fermentation began.
The results sit deliberately outside fashion. The 2011 Escombro — sixteen percent alcohol, old-vine Alicante Bouschet, not a word on the label — drew a CellarTracker review that has become part of the wine's folklore: "Richer than an old-fashioned Aussie Shiraz, but not from extraction — this tastes like the natural concentration of the grapes… More balanced than Justitia's scales… Is sold in some 3-star restaurants and in Bar Brutal." It was the reviewer's first hundred-point wine, and he thought about the bottle for three days. No anise, no coffee, no roasted notes — just fruit, herbs, structure and time.
And when a vintage was finished, Erik's work was finished. No marketing push, no scores chased, no expansion. A Dutch tasting report from 2019 records the whole method in a sentence: the wines are "not made with the most modern techniques, but with the ancient methods they used to use. He himself is not too complicated about it either — he just makes wine." The laboratory's only experiment was constancy.
The Wines — A Dozen Years, a Handful of Names
The portfolio was never a portfolio — it was a set of one-off acts, a few cuvées at a time, each vintage a small edition of a mountain. Six wines are currently catalogued by Raisin, all red, spanning Alicante Bouschet, Monastrell, Syrah, Bobal, Mourvèdre and varieties even the app couldn't identify. Production was tiny; availability now is whatever the world's cellars still hold.
Escombro
Natural red — old-vine Alicante Bouschet, Monte Arabí, YeclaThe legend — named for the ruin Erik lived in, and the wine that made the laboratory famous. Old-vine Alicante Bouschet, the red-fleshed dyeing grape, of such natural concentration that the 2011 reached 16% with no extraction, no makeup, no text on the label at all beyond a hand-drawn fish. Dark as ink, scented with herbs and dark and red berries, long, multifaceted, fabulously structured — a CellarTracker taster's first-ever 100 points, bought out of Bar Brutal's last bottle. Sold in three-star restaurants; traded at cult prices ever since. No added sulphites, unfiltered.
Ruina
Natural red — Syrah, Monte Arabí, YeclaThe wild side of Syrah — the cuvée that, as one Spanish taster wrote, brings out the grape's most fruity, fresh, structured face: a slightly earthier tannin, the alcohol perfectly integrated, no trace of new oak and no rough edges from the amphora. Vintages 2013, 2017 and 2019 all surfaced to acclaim, the 2019 commanding starred-restaurant list prices. The label carries Erik's drawing of an ornate hanging lamp trailing a single grape bunch. No added sulphites.
Bujes
Natural red — Monastrell, clay-limestone, YeclaThe century-old vineyard — Monastrell from two hectares of vines over 100 years old, planted at altitude on clay-limestone soil with limestone outcrops. Manual harvest, whole clusters resting six days in a buried amphora in two separate lots, spontaneous fermentation, six months in very old barrels — the 2024 bottled in February 2025 at 14.5% alcohol, pH 3.3, a trace of sulphur (37 mg/L total), 0.2 g/L residual sugar. Powerful, fruity and silky, with the surprising elegance and lean acidity that mark the whole laboratory. The mountain, unadorned.
Autorretrato · Chiquillo & Others
Rare cuvées — Bobal, Mourvèdre & unknown varieties, YeclaThe untraceables — cuvées such as Autorretrato (self-portrait) and Chiquillo (the kid) that surfaced on some of Europe's most exclusive menus without ever receiving a proper catalogue entry, alongside wines from Bobal, Mourvèdre and varieties even the natural-wine directories could not identify. They appeared at Vins Nus, vanished into cellars, and now surface only at auction and in collectors' trades. Each carried a hand-drawn label; each was, in effect, a signed print from the rock-art laboratory.
Legacy — The Winemaker Who Vanished on Purpose
Laboratorio Rupestre matters because it represents the purest form of the natural wine impulse — not a category, not a certification, not a market, but a person, a place, and a refusal. For a dozen years, Erik Rosdahl made wine the way the mountain allowed: old vines, calcareous soil, buried amphorae, no sulphites, no filtration, no press, no explanation. The wines reached three-star restaurants and Europe's most cult natural wine bars without a single euro of marketing, carried entirely by the fact that, as his Dutch host wrote, "a wine by Rosdahl never disappoints."
The legacy is artistic as much as agricultural. Rosdahl came to wine as an artist and a nomad, and he ran the project like one: hand-drawn labels instead of brand guidelines, a ruin instead of a château, a boat trip instead of a sales force, a final exit instead of a succession plan. Even the name was a work of art — a laboratory devoted to rupestre, the prehistoric art of the very mountain where the grapes grew, collapsing ten thousand years of human mark-making into a bottle of Monastrell. In an industry increasingly fluent in the language of authenticity, he simply embodied it, at a cost of being almost impossible to find.
The legacy is also an argument about endings. When the work felt complete, Rosdahl left — returning with his family to a forest in Sweden, letting the final vintages bottle out quietly into 2025. There was no fire sale, no relaunch, no brand sold to a fund. It is perhaps the most coherent final chapter in modern natural wine: a project whose founding gesture was a leap into the void, closing with a leap back into the trees. The best wine, he seemed to believe, tells a story without filters — and the best stories know when to stop.
And for the drinker, the legacy is a hunt. Escombro, Ruina, Bujes and the rest now live in the secondary market and the deepest corners of the world's best cellars — wines priced like art because, in the end, that is what they are: a Swedish artist's dozen-year correspondence with a magic mountain, signed in ink, sealed in glass, still waiting to be opened. Vinos para oler y catar. Wines for smelling and tasting. Nothing more was ever promised, and nothing more was ever needed.