The Cortijo, the Golden Oriole & 100% Garnacha y Amor
A couple who bought a farmhouse in the Alpujarra and discovered it came with a thousand Garnacha vines — Rober Ayala and María del Mar Fernández didn't plan to become winemakers, but Fondón had other ideas. Today they make the only natural wine in Almería, three thousand bottles a year, dry-farmed on Sierra Nevada's southern slope, with nothing added and their daughter's name on the rosé.
Origin — The Farmhouse That Came With a Vineyard
Rober Ayala and María del Mar Fernández were not looking for vines. In 2011, they bought a small cortijo in Fondón, a mountain village in the Alta Alpujarra of Almería, lured by the stone house, the silence, and the view of Sierra Nevada's snow-capped ridge. What the property deed didn't mention was the living inheritance: roughly 1,000 old Garnacha vines tangled into the hillside behind the house, and a small semi-underground cellar already cut into the rock.
That first autumn, fruit was already hanging on the vines. They harvested by hand, fermented with nothing but native yeasts, and bottled the wine with no additions, no filtration, no clarification — and no idea they had just made Almería's first natural wine. By 2012, the experiment had become a calling. They formalised the estate, gave it a name that needed no translation — Pura Vida — and settled into a life they hadn't planned but couldn't leave.
Their motto is as direct as their winemaking: "100% Garnacha y Amor." It sounds sentimental until you taste the wine. The love is not decorative; it is the entire methodology. Rober tends the vines. María tends the kitchen. Together they have built something that did not exist in their province before they arrived.
The Place — Where the Desert Meets the Snowline
Fondón sits at the foot of Sierra Nevada in the Alta Alpujarra, protected from the coast by the Sierra de Gádor. It is a landscape of extremes: Almería's famous desert dryness moderated by altitude, with vineyards planted between 850 and 1,000 metres on slopes that look south toward Africa. Everything is dry-farmed. Everything is hand-harvested. No chemicals touch the vines, and no irrigation lines run through the rows.
Two Soils, Two Altitudes
The estate's own half-hectare of Garnacha sits at 850 metres on clay soils, giving the reds their grip and dark fruit. The rented hectare of Macabeo, Tempranillo and Syrah climbs to 1,000 metres on sandy-loam, where the whites find their lift and the nights keep enough acidity to balance the Andalusian sun.
The Only Natural Wine in Almería
In a province known for plastic greenhouses and beach tourism, Pura Vida remains the sole producer of natural wine. There is no appellation safety net, no neighbouring natural estate to borrow equipment from, no established market — just conviction, and the slow work of proving that Almería's mountains can speak in the same language as the Loire or the Adelaide Hills.
Dry Land, Living Vines
No irrigation, no herbicides, no synthetic treatments. The vines survive on winter rainfall and mountain runoff alone, their roots diving deep into fractured Alpujarran soil for water. The yields are minuscule. The concentration is unmistakable.
Sierra Nevada's Shadow
The continent's highest peak looms behind the vineyard, creating a rain shadow that keeps the air dry and the diurnal shift dramatic — 30°C days, cool mountain nights. It is a climate of tension: Mediterranean generosity held in check by altitude and aridity.
Winemaking — Nothing Added, Nothing Taken, Nothing Rushed
The cellar philosophy is as spare as the landscape. Fermentation is always spontaneous, triggered by yeasts that live on the skins and in the mountain air. There are no sulfites, no metabisulfites, no enzymes, no corrections. The wines are neither filtered nor clarified. What goes into the vat is grapes; what comes out is wine; what happens in between is none of the winemaker's business.
Whites are pressed directly or given short skin macerations; the orange wine sees a month on its skins before gentle pressing. The reds macerate for roughly four weeks — whole bunches when possible — and age in stainless steel, with the exception of the Negre cuvée, which spends a year in old oak. The idea is not to shape the wine but to hold the frame while the Alpujarra fills it.
Production is tiny — around 3,000 bottles a year — and every bottle is spoken for before it is bottled. There is no commercial ambition to scale, no investor deck, no export strategy beyond word of mouth and the occasional curious caviste. Pura Vida is a project measured in intimacy, not volume.
The Wines — Three Thousand Bottles, Four Colours, One Mountain
From a single hillside and a rented high-altitude parcel, Rober and María coax white, rosé, red and orange — each one a different face of the Alpujarra, each one made with the same zero-input rigour.
Mac-Cabeam
Estate white100% Macabeo from 1,000 metres, direct-pressed with no maceration. Apple skin, white flowers and a flick of mountain salinity — a white wine that tastes like altitude and silence.
Pura Sara
Estate rosé100% Garnacha pressed directly off the skins, named for Rober and María's daughter. Wild strawberry, rosehip and clay-dust tannins — a rosé with the character of a light red, as fierce and gentle as its namesake.
Pura Vida Cosecha
Estate redThe flagship — 100% Garnacha from dry-farmed clay at 850 metres, four weeks of maceration, soft press, then twelve months in stainless steel. Juicy red cherry, wild herbs and the warm, stony grip of the Alpujarra.
Oropéndola
Skin-contact white100% Macabeo macerated on its skins for a month until it turns the colour of an Alpujarran sunset — the golden oriole that gives it its name. Apricot kernel, dried mountain herbs and tea-like tannin. The most sought-after bottle in the cellar.
Negre
Barrel-aged redA field blend of Garnacha, Tempranillo and Syrah from the rented high parcel, aged twelve months in old barrels. Deeper, more brooding — cocoa, tobacco and red berry compote held together by a mineral spine that betrays the altitude.
Legacy — Pioneers in a Province That Didn't Know It Needed Them
Pura Vida matters because it should not exist. Almería is Spain's most arid province, better known for invernaderos and beach resorts than for artisanal viticulture. The idea that natural wine — unfiltered, unsulfured, unapologetic — could emerge from these mountains was, until 2012, unthinkable. Rober and María thought it anyway, and then proved it.
Their legacy is not volume; it is permission. They have shown that dry-farmed mountain viticulture is possible at the desert's edge, that native-yeast fermentation works in a climate no textbook recommends, and that a province without a natural wine tradition can grow one from a single cortijo and a stubborn refusal to add anything to the grapes.
Through their enotourism — tastings in the shade of their own vines, María's Alpujarran cooking, the slow argument of a long lunch — they have also built something harder to bottle: a local culture that values what grows on the mountain more than what is imported to the coast. The featherweight production belies the weight of the precedent.