Engineer Santiago Bugallo – Vineyard Manager of Finca Río Seco
Santiago spent his childhood in Barreal, a small town in the foothills of the Andes, southeast of San Juan. And so was born his love for mountaineering. At 18 he graduated from agri-technological school and went to study Agronomic Engineering in Luján de Cuyo, Mendoza.
In Mendoza he found his passion for the vineyards where he worked his first harvests, and he then traveled to Napa Valley, California, to broaden his knowledge at the Paul Hobbs Winery. “In Cafayate I have succeeded in joining the two great passions of my life, the vineyards and the mountains. This valley, with its rocky soils, its wide thermic amplitude and its high altitude, is the perfect spot where great wines are born.”
Engineer Cecilia Echevarría – Vineyard Manager of Finca El Retiro
Born in Mendoza, she moved to Cafayate two years ago, and since then has worked with us as vineyard manager of Finca El Retiro. Her relationship with the wine industry began as a university student in the School of Agrarian Sciences of the National University of Cuyo. She also has a Técnico Viticoltura et Enología degree from the Univesitá delgi Studi in Udine, Italy.
In 2002 she worked at the Villa Russiz winery located in Friuli, Venezia Giulia, where she was the vineyard assistant during the entire harvest that year. She also worked in 2002 and 2003 in Mendoza with Familia Barberis, where she managed the control of third part vineyards and client services.
“I’m convinced that Cafayate is a valley created for vitviniculture, where nature is at once powerful, expressive and friendly, where the vineyard workers, dedicated for generations to the careful cultivation of the vine, learn and teach, achieving a blend of the ancestral and the vanguard, where little by little technology is only used where necessary to express the natural results of this chosen land.”