The Cellist, the Container & the Grape of the Land
In the Sierra de Lavia, in the Bullas mountains of Murcia, Julia Casado — a classically trained cellist who rebuilt herself as an agricultural engineer and oenologist — designed and built her own 66-square-metre modular winery with a €35,000 loan, and now makes three additive-free wines from three small old-vine plots at 700–800 metres. She named her project, and her first wine, for what the country folk of Bullas call their native grape: la del terreno — "the one from the land."
Origin — From the Cello to the Vineyard, via Havana
Julia Casado was born in Murcia, the daughter of a biologist and a psychologist — and her first passion was not wine at all. It was music. She heard a cello and knew she wanted to learn to play it. At twenty, freshly enrolled in agricultural engineering — "a degree I didn't like at all," she confesses — music pulled harder, and she left for Germany to learn the language and prepare for life as an orchestral musician. The system was so demanding that she burned out, took her cello diploma in Frankfurt, and returned to Spain to finish her studies, uncertain of everything except that her path would not be a straight line.
The hinge was Havana. A rural development course in Cuba changed her relationship with both music and agriculture, and when she came back she did the unthinkable: she completed the agronomy degree she had abandoned and then studied oenology at the Universidad Miguel Hernández in Elche, writing her final project — this was around 2005 — on blends of Monastrell with foreign varieties, which was then the fashion. Her education continued in the world's great classrooms: Josef Biffar in Germany, three months at Vega Sicilia, a harvest at Ortega Fournier in Mendoza, and then back to her own land, Jumilla, passing through Hacienda del Carche, Casa de la Ermita and Casa Castillo — where in 2015 she made the first official vintage of La del Terreno, released with a white label (today's is black).
"Al principio no pensaba montar una bodega" — at first she never intended to build a winery. But the more wines she tasted, the clearer it became that she could not make the wines she believed in while working for others. In 2016 she got in her car and drove to Bullas, because everyone told her it was different from the rest of Murcia: a high, green zone. She did what any producer does to find the best vineyards — she socialised in the village bar — and discovered that nearly all the local vine owners belonged to Bodegas del Rosario, the great Bullas cooperative. They welcomed her, offered their facilities, urged her to join the appellation. But Julia had already decided: she wanted a place of her own.
She found it in La Cañada del Jinete, a rented plot in the middle of the countryside beside a small renewable-energy school, inside a protected natural park. There, on land where she was permitted to build just 66 square metres, she took a €35,000 loan and raised a winery of her own design: a modular structure of prefabricated metal on railway sleepers, transportable, expandable, energy-efficient, engineered to the last centimetre. From the outside it looks like a shipping container. Inside, it is a genuine work of engineering — a winemaking room and an ageing room separated by a sliding door, a mini prefab apartment she jokes she could take anywhere, a container for storage, and a small porch a friend helped her build for drinking outdoors when the weather allows. It became her particular room of one's own — and her firmest hook into a landscape that had captivated her. "Lo bueno de empezar de cero es que he podido elegir el lugar y los viñedos con los que quiero trabajar." The good thing about starting from nothing: you get to choose the place, and the vines, you want to work with.
The Place — Bullas, the Oasis of Vines in a Dry Land
Bullas sits in the northwest of the Region of Murcia, where the land rises toward the Sierras de Burete, Lavia and Cambrón — a protected regional park and bird reserve of high, fresh valleys dotted with olive trees, almond trees and old Monastrell vineyards. Julia calls it "an oasis of vines in a region where old vineyards survive in the hands of small owners." She owns no vines herself — she couldn't afford them — so instead she has built partnerships with three local smallholder families, each giving her one small plot, each plot giving her one wine.
700–800 Metres: Air, Altitude & Old Vines
The three plots all sit between 700 and 800 metres, inside the Bullas PDO — high and cool enough that snow can still lie on the vineyards in late January, a world away from the heat of the Murcian lowlands. Here grow old Monastrell bush vines — one plot more than fifty years old — plus Garnacha on clay at around 750 metres. The altitude gives the wines what Julia prizes most in Monastrell: a freshness that makes you want another glass, violet aromatics where the lowland versions offer only weight.
Granite Gravel over Clay — Venta del Pino
The plot behind La del Terreno lies in the paraje of Venta del Pino: stony ground with a topsoil of granite gravel and sand over clay that retains water, in a well-ventilated corridor. "This makes it vegetate well even in hot years," Julia explains. She chose it for its orientation, its soil profile — and for the 5% of old local white varieties mixed through the Monastrell, which lift and perfume the wine in a way no cellar technique could.
Red Clay & Amphora — La Cañada del Jinete
The second plot, which gives its name to the winery's site, grows old Monastrell on red clay in the paraje del Jinete. This is the wine fermented in clay amphora and raised in used foudre — the freer, more extreme expression of the range, marked by the vessel and the soil alike. The clay holds water and warmth differently, giving a rounder, darker, more mineral Monastrell — the same variety speaking in a deeper register.
The Cooperative Connection — Valle del Aceniche
The third wine is a collaboration. Across the Sierra de Lavia, in the Valle del Aceniche, Julia found three Garnacha parcels that had never been worked separately — 20-year-old vines on clay and calcareous gravel at 750 metres — and vinified them alone for the first time, alongside the Bodegas del Rosario cooperative whose members own them. Her partnership with the coop — the social heart of Bullas viticulture — is deliberate: small projects like hers, she says, can help keep the old vines standing.
Winemaking — Whole Bunches, Bare Feet & No Additives
Everything at La del Terreno is handmade — literally. Grapes arrive in small batches from the three plots and are foot-trodden, fermented whole-cluster with indigenous yeasts, given short macerations (around six days for La del Terreno), and raised in open wooden vats, concrete, clay amphora and used foudre — roughly eight months for the flagship, in concrete. No additives. No filtration. No modern technological practices. The aim is authenticity: the typicity of the variety, the local character of the place, and the truthful signature of each climatological vintage — even when the vintage, like the electricity-less nightmare of 2016, writes a difficult one.
Julia's relationship with Monastrell is the project's emotional core. "Es una uva aparentemente muy ruda, pero me interesa la delicadeza que esconde" — it is a grape that seems very rough, but it is the delicacy it hides that interests me. She describes it as a rough tree bark wrapped in floral, violet notes; expressive, layered, and exceptionally good at reflecting landscape. Her flagship is accordingly a Monastrell wilder and more untamed than the regional average — earthy at first, then full in the mouth, persistent, finishing on violet and scrubland — with a freshness that invites a second glass.
The Garnacha is her wine for everyone — and her most technically counterintuitive. "La garnacha es fácil y alegre de beber, pero complicada de entender porque hay que vinificarla como un blanco macerado, casi como si fuera una infusión" — easy and joyful to drink, but complicated to understand, because you must vinify it like a macerated white, almost like an infusion. The first vintage nearly reached 17% alcohol, yet the balance of alcohol, tannin and acidity made it feel light. It is fresh, expressive, unpretentious — the bottle that introduces strangers to the project.
And threading through everything is the music. "Vino y música tienen mucho que ver" — wine and music have a lot to do with each other. "The concept of harmony is very present in both worlds; both need a certain tension, and neither makes sense if it isn't shared with others." She notes, almost in passing, how sensitive wine is to vibrations — the cellist never entirely left the cellar. For Julia, this is not decoration but method: coherence matters more to her than novelty, and she is drawn to producers rooted in their territory. "Si entiendes el vino como arte, debe existir ese vínculo emocional. Yo no podría hacer vino en una zona que no amo." If you understand wine as art, the emotional bond must exist. She could not make wine in a place she does not love.
The Wines — Three Plots, Three Wines, Three Characters
The range is deliberately minimal: one wine per plot, each named for its place, each made with spontaneous fermentations, no additives and no filtration. Production is tiny and self-financed — a few thousand bottles per cuvée — and every bottle is made inside the 66-square-metre modular winery at the foot of the vines. Figures below are approximate and shift with the vintage.
La del Terreno
Natural red — Paraje de la Venta del Pino, DOP BullasThe flagship and the name of everything — old-vine Monastrell (95%) with 5% of the plot's old white local varieties, from vines over fifty years old on granite gravel over water-retaining clay at Venta del Pino. Foot-trodden whole bunches, six days of maceration, spontaneous fermentation — part in open wooden tinos, part in concrete, where the wine rests around eight months. The result is a Monastrell wilder and more untamed than the regional average: earthy at first approach, then full and persistent, finishing on violet and scrubland, with a freshness that makes you reach for another glass. Around 6,600 bottles in good years. No additives, unfiltered.
La Cañada del Jinete
Natural red — Paraje del Jinete, DOP BullasThe amphora voice — old Monastrell from red clay in the paraje that names the winery itself. Fermented in clay amphora, raised in used foudre, the wine pursues what Julia calls a freer, more extreme expression within natural winemaking: rounder, darker, more mineral than the flagship, the same grape speaking from a different soil and a different vessel. Production is the most limited of the range — around 1,700 bottles when the vintage allows (it was not made at all in 2017). The collector's bottle of the project, and the one that shows what clay and amphora can do to Bullas Monastrell.
Ninja de las Uvas
Natural red — Valle del Aceniche, Sierra de LaviaThe joyful one — red Garnacha from 20-year-old vines on clay and calcareous gravel at 750 metres, made in collaboration with the Bodegas del Rosario cooperative from three parcels that had never before been vinified separately. Vinified, in Julia's phrase, like a macerated white, almost like an infusion — which is why the first vintage could reach nearly 17% alcohol yet still drink light. The name and label are her playful nod to the cooperative's traditional brand Niño de las Uvas, itself a reference to the famous Roman sculpture of Los Cantos. Fresh, expressive, uncomplicated in the best sense. First vintage November 2018; around 4,000 bottles a year.
Legacy — The Self-Made Voice of a Forgotten Grape
La del Terreno matters because it answers, with unusual honesty, the question of how a new generation enters wine when it has no inheritance to lean on. Julia Casado is not the daughter of a wine family. She is the daughter of a biologist and a psychologist, a former orchestral cellist from Murcia who rebuilt herself — degree by degree, country by country, cellar by cellar — into one of the most distinctive small winemakers in southeastern Spain. Her winery is a self-designed, self-financed 66-square-metre modular building that looks like a shipping container and works like an instrument. Her vineyard holdings are zero hectares; her relationships, with three smallholder families in the Bullas mountains, are the asset instead. Every element of the project is proof that the old gatekeeping of wine — land, lineage, capital — can be replaced by conviction, coherence and craft.
Her legacy is varietal and regional. Monastrell is Murcia's great grape and its great cliché — thick-skinned, brutish, made into warm, anonymous bulk wine by the region's industrial giants. Julia took the variety's own folk name for her project and then proceeded to show what the clichique hides: that old-vine, high-altitude Monastrell farmed organically in Bullas can be floral, fresh, layered and fine — a violet wrapped in tree bark. In a region where old vineyards are being uprooted because no one believes they are worth keeping, she pays small growers for fruit from plots over fifty years old, and argues publicly that small projects like hers help conserve the vineyard patrimony of the zone. She is, quite literally, a market for survival.
Her legacy is also cultural and communal. She arrived in Bullas as an outsider and did the most old-fashioned thing possible: she went to the village bar. Today she works inside the appellation with the cooperative whose members own the vines she needs, she exports to a dozen countries, and she pours at natural wine fairs in France — La Remise, La Goulayance — where reference growers like Thierry Puzelat count her among their own. She is careful about the word "natural" — at first she resisted the label — yet everything she does embodies the movement's best argument: organic farming, spontaneous fermentation, no additives, no filtration, and total transparency about place.
And her legacy is philosophical. "El pensamiento único empobrece; la diversidad es un valor fundamental." Single-mindedness impoverishes; diversity is a fundamental value. She says it about regions and wine styles, but it is also her autobiography — the cellist who became an oenologist, the city girl who built a container in a natural park, the winemaker with no vines who bottles three mountains. "Everything good that our neighbours do adds to the zone." In the Sierra de Lavia, that is more than a sentiment. It is the business model, the art practice, and the point.