Jorge Ordóñez

Jorge Ordóñez founded Fine Estates from Spain in 1987, in the United States, and was the first American importer to keep and ship Spanish wine under refrigeration.

In 2004 he set up Bodegas Jorge Ordóñez Málaga in partnership with the Kracher family, from Austria, with the idea of reviving a winemaking tradition that phylloxera had destroyed in the nineteenth century. The wines were created by Alois Kracher from Muscat of Alexandria off old vines on slate and white quartz. In Málaga that grape has been grown for more than two thousand years.

His sister Victoria Ordóñez, a doctor of medicine who had previously run a biomedical research institute, joined the project while Alois Kracher, who died in 2007, was still alive; it was he who insisted on bringing her in and teaching her everything, from harvesting and grape selection to barrel ageing. In 2015 she parted company with her brother.

The Málaga wines come from the Lagar del Fraile vineyard, in Vélez-Málaga, in the Axarquía: slopes of up to 70% with no terracing, bush vines, organic and entirely hand-worked. They are late-harvested, and it takes 3.75 kilos of fruit for each 375-millilitre bottle.

He also has a project in Toro, Jorge Ordóñez Selección, which produces Tritón: forty hectares of bush vines in Morales and Toro, on very sandy alluvial soils with a layer of red clay two or three metres down.