Bodega Cerro del Toro

The resort town of Piriápolis, on the Maldonado coast, was founded in the 1890s by Francisco Piria, a Montevideo property developer with a keen interest in alchemy. He was also an enthusiastic grape grower, and by the early 1900s his estate behind the town ran to some 200 hectares of vines, under the watchful eye of winemaker Brenno Benedetti (grandfather of the famed Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti) who Francisco had brought over from Italy. Among its products was Cognacquina Piriápolis, a spirit sold on its supposed healing powers. 

A century later, vines are back on the hill, planted by a Japanese shipbuilding family. In 1956 Hideo Kambara – mayor of Numakuma, in Hiroshima prefecture, and head of the Tsuneishi shipbuilding company – travelled to Brazil and Paraguay looking for land where people from his town could start again after the war. His son, Makoto, who went on to lead the family’s businesses, carried those ties into Uruguay, buying rice and cattle land in Rocha in 1975, and opening a shipyard in Montevideo. In 1982, he bought 800 hectares at Piriápolis, taking in Cerro del Toro and its northern slope, and he began planting vines at the encouragement of his friend, the Norwegian businessman Lars Ugland. That same winery is now run by Makoto’s son, Takao. 

The 28 hectares of vines are divided into 52 plots on slopes two kilometres from the Atlantic, at 60-128 metres. More than 70 test pits were dug before anything was planted, revealing decomposed syenite and metamorphic rock from an ancient volcanic chain, above a layer of calcium carbonate left by the fossilised creatures of an old seabed. Native scrub and patches of coronilla woodland have been kept, some of it inside the vineyard.

Albariño is the flagship grape, and the planting list shows where the team’s heart lies; alongside Tannat, Merlot and Chardonnay grow Godello, Mencía and Caiño Tinto from Spain’s Atlantic north-west. Its current winemaker, Martín Viggiano, is a former newspaper journalist who has become one of Uruguayan Albariño’s most outspoken champions.