RadicanteBorn in Tijuana and raised in Ensenada, Oscar Mancillas was privy to wine from a young age. Ensenada was sherry house Domecq’s first foray into making solera style wines outside of Spain, first planting Palomino and other Spanish varieties here in 1961. Many of his friends and their families were involved in winemaking, and the father of one of his closest friends owned La Escuelita, a cooperative winery space and incubator in the emerging Valle de Guadalupe. Oscar’s parents wanted him to be an engineer, but those studies didn’t satisfy him. Needing a job, he found work at a local wine store and as his interest deepened, he was able to move over to La Escuelita to work in the vines, quickly becoming a manager of several vineyards throughout Baja and Southern California. He did end up going back to college, but it was at the prestigious Universitat Rovia I Virgili in Tarragona Spain for a master’s degree in agronomy, followed by an internship at the venerable Raventos i Blanc in the Penedès. Oscar felt a connection to the Catalan countryside, eventually moving up the coast to the Roussillon and taking a position to manage 60 hectares of vines and 2 wineries. It was here where he fell in love with natural wine, becoming a regular at the local natural wine bar in Perpignan and befriending another regular and winemaker Raph Baissas. They soon co-founded Domaine Nada, working together farming and making minimal intervention wines, among those were the first Radicante wines.
His tenure at Domaine Nada proved to be short-lived as the two ultimately decided the project was too small to support both as full time winemakers. While searching for his next gig, Oscar was convinced by his friend Noel Tellez of Bichi wines to return home and help fine tune a more minimal style of winemaking in Mexico. Oscar returned to the Valle for the 2023 vintage, and his old friends even sold him grapes for his first Mexican vintage of Radicante made at La Escuelita, where he is now managing several different vineyards and has taken over as director of the cooperative. Oscar is in the process of building his own small urban winery in downtown Ensenada in a space that was once his grandparents’ grocery store and home. He’s planting several varieties on his family’s ranch such as Garnacha Blanca and Negra, Colombard, and even Xarel-lo. Oscar is staying true to his project’s name, as Radicante translates to “creating and putting down roots.” The Wines
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