Bodegas Frontonio

Foot-crushed Garnacha in a cave cellar

Foot-crushing keeps the high-range Garnacha intact; Fernando Mora MW works as Winemaker at Bodegas Frontonio in Saragossa. His station is Alpartir, on the mountain flanks of the Sierra del Jalón, where the bodega occupies an underground cave cut into the hillside and the vineyards sit above a village whose wine culture had thinned almost to disappearance. Mora founded the project with the long view of a grower and the technical eye of a maker who became a Master of Wine in 2017. The house opened in 2012, but its cellar reaches further back: an 18th–19th century, three-level bodega, cool enough and damp enough to make patience feel like part of the equipment. Frontonio works under the Valdejalón Vino de la Tierra designation, outside a formal DO, in a zone tied to Garnacha’s genetic origins. That position suits the method. The work here is not to polish the grape into weight, but to recover old, high-altitude parcels and keep their lift, salinity, and texture intact.

Twenty-seven and a half hectares, farmed the long way

The program rests on 27.5 hectares of old, high-altitude vineyards, farmed organically, dry-farmed, and worked for limited-production wines of about 150,000 bottles per year. Garnacha Tinta leads the cellar, with Macabeo, Garnacha Blanca, and Mazuela also in the frame. The vines are traditional bush vines on hard slopes, and the parcels carry the differences that matter at the bench: volcanic, sedimentary, metamorphic, slate, altitude, vine age, exposure. Frontonio does not force one elevage across the range. Microcósmicos ferments and rests in cement for immediacy; Telescópico takes longer maceration and used-oak elevage, with Mazuela giving structure beside Garnacha. For the single-parcel wines, the cellar lets the vineyard set the discipline. Supersónico comes from a vineyard at 1,030m and includes a small amount of Macabeo. La Cerqueta is Garnacha from vines planted in the 1940s on gray and blue slate at 630m, fermented with 100% whole cluster. The numbers are not decoration here. They are the map.

Three levels below Alpartir

The cellar changes the pace of the work. Frontonio’s bodega drops into three subterranean levels beneath Alpartir, with chimneys venting air through the mountain and buttress ceilings holding the cold at the lowest floor. Garnachas and Macabeos age there without the glare of a show cellar. The room is quiet, dim, and practical, closer to a working cave than a polished tasting salon. Cement, used wood, stems, skins, and old stone do the talking. The scale stays small enough for decisions to remain bench-side: when to keep whole clusters, when to use oak, when to let cement carry the fruit without imprint. In a village named through Saint Frontonio, whose legend runs against the current of the Ebro, the house has kept that same contrarian direction. The clearest close is still in the cellar, where La Cerqueta takes its line from gray and blue slate.