An independent, first-generation wine project in Rioja Alavesa, northern Spain, founded in 2025 by Alexey Olkhovoi. ¿OLLIN? is a Nahuatl word — movement with intent, the soul that moves — and the seventeenth sign of the Aztec calendar. It also carries my surname inside it and reads as all-in. The brand asks questions instead of answering them; every wine is named as one.

Not yet. The wine is made at Bodegas Bhilar in Rioja Alavesa, the estate where I worked the 2025 harvest as a volunteer — I buy the fruit, rent the space and do the work myself, which is how a lot of small independent producers start. From the 2026 vintage the barrels are my own.

The first vintage was 1,500 kg of hand-picked fruit — four barrels, under a thousand bottles in total. The 2026 harvest is planned at 3,000 kg: 2,000 kg of red and 1,000 kg of white. Small enough that I touch every bottle, and small enough that a vintage can sell out and simply not come back.

Literally. Each bottle carries a code that opens a page belonging to that wine alone: why it asks the question it asks, what the place was doing that season, and the answers other drinkers have left. There are no scores and no tasting notes anywhere in the project. The bottle starts a conversation; I don't get to finish it.

I do — Alexey Olkhovoi, a career-changer with no wine family behind me. Eleven years in technology, the last of them as a CTO, then a move to Rioja in May 2025 and a harvest at Bodegas Bhilar that September. Buying, picking, pressing, racking, bottling and labelling are all mine.

I am studying with WSET and working harvests to learn the rest by hand. My university degree is in [ fill in: field + university ] — not oenology, which I say plainly rather than hide. What I bring instead is eleven years of shipping things that could fail publicly.

Because the question wouldn't go away. The internship I'd planned in Bordeaux fell through on a migration technicality, I went to Rioja as a volunteer instead, and by the end of that harvest I had bought grapes I had nowhere to put. That is the whole plan, honestly stated.

From two plots in the village of Labraza, in Rioja Alavesa, the Álava side of Rioja, in the Basque Country — Atalaya for the white and Pozarrón for the red. They sit between roughly 578 and 612 metres on calcareous clay, with cold nights coming off the Sierra de Cantabria. Viura for the white, Tempranillo for the red.

As a question the place asked that year, not as a flavour it handed over. Altitude, limestone and the swing between afternoon and midnight are facts; what they meant in 2025 was less acid than I wanted and a decision to make about it. I write down the decision, not an adjective.

Yes — Rioja, Rioja Alavesa, and labelled with the village it came from. The second line will go further and name single parcels rather than a region, one plot and one year at a time, without blending across sites.

Low-intervention in practice, undogmatic on principle. Hand-picked fruit, native ferment, no fining, minimal sulphur — but I corrected acidity in 2025 because the fruit needed it, and I would rather tell you that than sell a purity story. One red barrel lost its bung and stood open for two days; it came out better than the ones that behaved.

Vintage 2025 — What if yes? Blanco (Viura) and What if yes? Tinto (Tempranillo) — bottled by hand on 12 June 2026. The parcel line is still in barrel and has no release date. Vintage 2026 is being picked now.

Because a maker disappears at the moment a bottle is opened — the meaning after that belongs to whoever is drinking. What if yes? is not a slogan; it is what the open barrel asked me in November 2025, and the label prints it in letters cut from a potato so the mark is a real press rather than a drawing.

Yes. Volumes are genuinely small, so allocation is by conversation — write to alex@ollin.wine with the market and the list you're building. Spain and the EU first; Mexico and the United States are next on the map.

Vintages is the working diary — picking dates, cellar decisions, bottling, labels, mistakes. It is updated while things happen rather than after they've been made to sound intentional.