Born in Navarra, Luis Moya has always been involved with wine. An agricultural engineer, he opened a bar at the age of 26 before focusing on winemaking, first at the Aibar cooperative and later at EVENA, Navarra's viticulture and oenology centre. In 2012 he began making wine on his own as a hobby, eventually developing his own project, which has now reached 25,000 bottles. The main focus is on Navarra, but he also produces in Rioja and has released a txakoli from Orduña (Bizkaia). Most of his wines are not under DO.
Among his achievements is the revival of txakolingorri, a zesty, pale red that was traditionally made in the Pamplona basin, mainly from Garnacha. Called Ostoki (€20, fewer than 1,000 bottles, place of leaves in Basque), for the 2017 and 2018 vintages he sourced grapes from the few remaining vineyards on the slopes of Mount Ezkaba, near the city of Pamplona. After a two-year break, he resumed production in 2021, using a young vineyard in Cizur Menor, which allowed him to preserve the wine's crunchy herbal and green peppery notes.
This property in Cizur Menor is also the source of the Clarete Cerro Amurdi (around 1,000 bottles, €13), a wine to be enjoyed on release. Garnacha plays a minor role here, blended with 70% Pinot Noir and a small amount of white grape varieties.
The rest of the wines come from around 4.5 hectares of rented land in the Valdizarbe (silt soils) and Ribera Alta (clay soils) sub-regions between the villages of Artazu and Artajona. "I am very changeable and inclined to complicate things. First I work with the plots, then I create the blends," explains Moya. Fermentation usually involves around 15% of the stems.
The red Korteta (3,000 bottles, €16), for example, is a blend of some of these plots. The Garnacha is dominant, but there is also about 10% Graciano, which adds tension and grip. The wine is aged for a year in oak barrels and another year in stainless steel tanks before being bottled. Artaxo (1,200 bottles, €22, 12 months in barrel) is a seductive, fragrant, juicy Garnacha with a perfect sweet-acid balance - the blend is limited to a 30-year-old plot in Artazu and another in Artajona.
The single-vineyard reds are usually aged for 12 months in large, seasoned barrels. The range includes Ostoki (€20, 600 bottles), a herbal, floral, spicy expression of Garnacha, thanks to a relatively early harvest; and El Yesal (€28, less than 1,000 bottles), which shows riper fruit, complexity and a distinctive expression due to the high limestone content of this plot with dazzling white soils.
For the 2021 vintage, Moya separately bottled one of the vineyards destined for Korteta, a field blend of 50% Garnacha, 30% Monastrell and 20% Tempranillo, to produce Korteta Cuvée (1,800 bottles).
La Tapada (6,000 bottles, €20) comes from a 70-year-old plot in Azagra, in the Navarra area of the DOCa Rioja. The wine is aged in a combination of 225-litre seasoned barrels, flextanks and glass demijohns.
Moya is also involved in a joint project with Gonzalo Celayeta, a well-known producer based in San Martín de Unx (Baja Montaña), from where they source their grapes. They produce two pét-nats under the Kimera brand: a Garnacha Blanca with a small addition of directly pressed red Garnacha juice, and a rosé with exactly the opposite grape variety ratio. It all started with the idea of making a red Garnacha aged in tinaja (clay jugs). They had such a hard time getting the vessels that the whole thing seemed like a chimera, hence the name. The red Kimera (7,000 bottles, €14) they finally managed to produce is a fresh, fruit-driven wine with plenty of herbal notes, a distinctive feature of wines from San Martín de Unx.
In the 2021 vintage Moya started making Gorobel (1,600 bottles) from Hondarrabi Zuri grapes grown in Orduña, in the Bizkaia txakoli region. After 10 days of skin-contact, the wine combines the acidity and tension expected from this area with an extra charge of tannins brought by the skins.
