The Hairy Star & the Activist's Hand

The story of Stella Crinita is the story of two worlds colliding in a vineyard. Ernesto Catena was born into Argentine wine royalty — the fourth generation of a family whose name is synonymous with the elevation of Malbec and the transformation of Mendoza into a world-class wine region. His father, Nicolás Catena Zapata, and the broader Catena family built an empire of precision and prestige, but Ernesto was drawn to a smaller, wilder, more personal expression. Joanna Foster was raised across Malaysia, India and the United Kingdom, the daughter of a social and environmental activist whose work took the family to Greece and South Asia. Joanna inherited not only a global perspective but a fierce commitment to justice, ecology, and the dignity of the land — values that would eventually define the vineyard as much as the wine.

They met in 1995 when Joanna's activism brought her to Argentina. The connection was immediate and profound: two people united by a belief that wine could be a vehicle for social and environmental good, not merely a commercial product. They married in 2004 and now have three children. In 2002, even as the Catena family's industrial success continued apace, Joanna and Ernesto began farming a small parcel in Vista Flores according to biodynamic principles — at a time when, in Argentina, such practices were still dismissed as little more than witchcraft. For fifteen years they tended the land, built the soil, and observed the rhythms of the place before finally, in 2017, they liberated their wines from all restrictions and launched Bodega Stella Crinita — a comet streaking across the conservative Mendoza sky.

The name Stella Crinita — "hairy star" in Latin, the ancient term for a comet — was chosen deliberately. A comet is unpredictable, luminous, and disruptive; it appears without warning, challenges the established order of the heavens, and leaves an indelible trace. This is the project's ethos. While the Catena name carries the weight of history and expectation, Stella Crinita is free, experimental, and uncompromising. Joanna leads the project with a passionate and dedicated team, while Ernesto contributes the viticultural intuition of a lifetime in Mendoza's finest vineyards. Together they have created something that is neither a rebellion against the family legacy nor a continuation of it, but a parallel universe — a place where biodynamic farming, social justice, and natural winemaking converge in a tiny, luminous burst of authenticity.

The cellar philosophy of Stella Crinita is one of absolute non-intervention and total transparency. All fermentation is spontaneous, using nothing more than the native yeasts that are present on the grapes and in the vineyard at harvest. No selected yeasts, no enzymes, no tannins, no commercial additives of any kind are introduced at any stage. The wines are made exclusively from estate fruit — there is no purchased fruit, no external contracts, no compromise with the vineyard's integrity. And no SO₂ is added at any stage — not at harvest, not during fermentation, not at bottling. The wines are not fined and not filtered, leaving them cloudy, alive, and deeply individual.

Head winemaker Alejandro Kuschnaroff — young, passionate, and living close to the estate — orchestrates the cellar with a light but attentive hand. The Omaggio pét-nats are made by direct pressing (for the rosé and white versions) or whole-bunch fermentation (for the reds), then bottled while still fermenting via the ancestral method so that the final sugar is consumed in the bottle, creating a gentle, natural effervescence. The Simbiosis Rosé is a Syrah pét-nat made by direct pressing without destemming, fermented at 10–12°C for 20 days in stainless steel, then bottled with 12 g/L residual sugar to finish its fermentation in the bottle and rest for 9 months on the lees before release. The Cosmovision Chardonnay from Gualtallary is fermented with indigenous yeasts in French foudres, roll fermentors, and used barrels, then aged for 12 months on lees with no added SO₂ and no filtration — a skin-contact-inflected white of extraordinary texture and mineral persistence.

The still reds — Barbera, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, and the Amici Miei blend — are fermented spontaneously and aged in second- and third-use French oak barrels for 12 to 14 months, depending on the cuvée. The goal is never wood influence but gentle oxygenation and slow integration, allowing the raw, vivid fruit of the biodynamic vineyard to mature into wines of structure, savouriness, and honest depth. Temperature is not aggressively controlled; the wines are allowed to ferment at their own pace, in their own time, in the quiet of the small cellar. The result is a range of wines that are cloudy, textured, and unmistakably alive — each bottle a document of a specific vintage, a specific parcel, and a specific refusal to compromise.

Stella Crinita is not merely a winery; it is a proof that a scion of Argentine wine royalty and a global activist, armed with 7 hectares of biodynamic vineyard, a herd of llamas, and a refusal to add a single molecule of sulfur to their wine, can produce bottles that challenge the hierarchy of an entire country's viticulture. In an era when the Uco Valley is dominated by industrial scale, globalised palates, and the relentless pursuit of critical scores, Joanna Foster and Ernesto Catena have demonstrated that the same Vista Flores loam can produce wines that are cloudy rather than polished, raw rather than refined, and zero-sulfite rather than chemically preserved — if the farming is biodynamic, the cellar is a place of absolute non-intervention, and the philosophy is one of social and environmental justice rather than commercial ambition.

The legacy of Stella Crinita is the legacy of the activist's hand applied to viticulture. Joanna Foster did not come to Mendoza to build a brand; she came to heal a relationship with the earth, to reconnect with nature in a genuine way, and to prove that wine can be a force for good. The horses that work the soil, the chickens that control the pests, the llamas that graze the cover crops, and the bees that pollinate the food forest are not agricultural props; they are living partners in a regenerative system that treats the vineyard as an organism rather than a factory. The zero-sulfite rule is not a marketing gimmick but a statement of trust — trust in the health of the biodynamic fruit, the cleanliness of the cellar, and the ability of natural processes to produce wine that is stable, vibrant, and deeply nourishing. And the comet on the label is not merely decorative; it is a symbol of disruption — a reminder that the most luminous objects in the wine sky are often the most unexpected.

The future of the project is tied to the future of the Yin Yang Vineyard as it matures into its second decade, and to the growing global community of drinkers who seek wines that are not only delicious but ethically produced, regeneratively farmed, and transparently made. As the 2014 vines accumulate another year of root depth in the Vista Flores loam, as the Omaggio pét-nats find their audience among natural wine bars from Buenos Aires to Brooklyn, and as the Cosmovision Chardonnay proves that a Gualtallary white can be both profound and zero-sulfite, Stella Crinita remains what it has always intended to be: a comet — a hairy star — streaking across the Mendoza sky, leaving a trail of biodynamic light, activist conviction, and uncompromising flavour in its wake. The story of Stella Crinita is the story of two people who looked at the conventions of Argentine wine and chose to make something smaller, wilder, and more honest — and who proved that the best bottle from the Uco Valley is the one that needs no chemical explanation, only a glass, a meal, and the patience to let the Vista Flores soil speak.