Chile’s tale of two cities: 1,200+ wines reviewed

The sun is beginning to caress the reddish horizon, and as the light flickers and fades, the sheer Andean rock face that rises almost immediately behind the small winery turns from golden to cream to an almost pearly white color. Further down, a creek cuts this horseshoe of hills in two, revealing an amphitheater of vineyards that look out across the Central Valley of Chile. This is Cachapoal, not nearly as fashionable or well-known as some of Chile’s other wine regions such as Colchagua or Maipo, but this particular eastern area is about as close as it gets to pure mountain territory, and the temperature is falling fast as long shadows bathe the slopes.

Inside the winery the winemaker draws most of the wine from Gamba and Stockinger botti — large oak casks traditionally used in Italian wine. “I’ve been trying to cut back on new barrels to better express the fruit,” Gabriel Mustakis explains. Each micro-parcel we sample shows marked differences, which can only be attributed to the multitude of exposures and soils the terroir here offers, ranging from steep, granitic slopes to flatter, gravelly piedmonts. Yet this is no boutique winery. It’s the fine winemaking arm of Viña San Pedro, which is Chile’s second largest producer and a behemoth in the South American wine industry.

The contrast could hardly be starker. Its bustling main production facility in Molina, Curicó, is more akin to an Amazon warehouse, with giant trucks servicing the sprawling aluminum complex day in, day out. Some even say its holdings there occupy the largest continuous expanse of vineyards on Planet Wine. It’s certainly a world away from the modest Bodega San Pedro Cachapoal, which until recently was known only by the estate name Altair.

Chilean wine: Mass production versus quality

This is not to belittle industry and mass-production wines, which Chile produces to a decent standard. On the contrary, it’s impressive that the likes of San Pedro are able to diversify their business and give their premium divisions more and more free rein. But it does illustrate the huge divide between quality and purely price-focused wines, and not everyone is managing the two sides pragmatically.

“The top end of the Chilean wine market, the ultra-premium sector, is growing well at around 15 percent per year,” says Eduardo Chadwick, president of Viña Errázuriz and the maker of some of Chile’s most famous premium wines such as Seña and Viña Chadwick. “But the entry-level wines are falling in revenue by about the same amount. This is pushing down grape prices in some cases to 50 US cents per kilo or even lower. We’re having to uproot thousands of hectares of vineyards. We’re so export driven and have often focused on the wrong markets. Chile still has a huge image problem.”

With many wineries having to accept a pittance for their wines, it’s hardly surprising that many are flailing. In our tastings of more than 1,200 wines, we felt that, overall, quality was slightly lower than last year but my dad and I along with senior editors Nick Stock and Stuart Pigott as well as two tasting coordinators found many outstanding wines – some totally world class.

Chilean wine is very much a tale of two cities. Just as the bottom-end wines are struggling to find an identity, the most daring Chilean viticulturists are pushing innovation to the limits and some of the highest-rated wines in their history are being released on the market. And they are joining the ranks of some of the best of the world, from balanced and structured cabernet sauvignons to subtle yet flavorful syrahs and pinot noirs.

Take Felipe Tosso of Ventisquero. The enthusiastic head winemaker has just finished driving me through the estate’s newest plantings of vertical post-trained syrah and head-pruned grenache in Apalta, when he exclaims, “Let’s taste these cool wines we’ve just started making in the Atacama Desert.”

Slightly aghast, I begin dissecting a flight of chardonnay, sauvignon blanc and pinot and syrah. These seem to be, at first glance, the wrong varieties for an arid, hostile environment, even if you accept that wine can be made in an area that is closer to the equator than Cairo and lucky to see any rainfall at all in the year!

Amazingly, the wines are fresh and vivid, displaying a subtle, earthy texture quite unlike anything else I’ve experienced during my three-week trip through Chile. “The vineyard is very close to the coast, which provides a moderating influence,” assures my host. “I do admit that the extreme salinity and lack of water means winemaking is extremely challenging. But the calcium-rich soils are unparalleled in Chile, and that’s why we’re determined to make it work.”

The Humboldt Current, the cool ocean influence that makes its way thousands of miles up the coast of Chile, is what makes viticulture possible in the country’s northern agricultural extremities. Its effect is particularly pronounced as the coastal range doesn’t extend that far up the country, at times giving way to tame rolling hills and plateaus. Even the country’s biggest player, Concha y Toro, has been exploiting these windswept territories for some time.

Around 300 kilometers south of Atacama ( a stone’s throw by Chilean standards), the company is making superb chardonnay from a vineyard called Quebrada Seca in Limarí. The whites from these clayey soils, above a bedrock of limestone, always come with an unexpected minerality and vibrancy to counterbalance the riper notes induced by the high levels of sunlight in this area. Of course, innovation doesn’t need to be extreme. The best wines in Chile are still those being made in the traditional appellations — Maipo and Colchagua.

Chile’s 2017 wine vintage

The vintage of 2017 will be remembered by most as the year in which forest fires brought widespread devastation to the wine industry and the nation at large. Over 500,000 hectares of land was burnt, an area about the same size as the US state of Delaware.

Even now, as you pass up and down the country, charred stumps and burnt-out habitations are a sober reminder of the power mother nature wields. A small number of samples submitted did also show evidence of smoke taint. This said, much of the wine made that year is exciting, particularly in the Maipo Valley. Puente Alto, the nondescript and frankly slightly ugly Santiago suburb, which would otherwise be unknown were it not for the stunning wines it produces, is ground zero in 2017 for great cabernet.

As Michel Friou, winemaker of Almaviva details: “The 2017 was very hot and early with a reduced yield. We harvested three weeks earlier than usual. However, we had the benefit of wet conditions in 2016, and so while the summer in 2017 was dry, the soil didn’t suffer. The summer is what makes the wine, but the winter makes the soil. So, these were excellent circumstances.”

The best 2017s are ripe and powerful but incredibly structured with firm tannin backbones. Indeed, we gave 100-point scores to both Almaviva and Viñedo Chadwick, with Don Melchor coming close behind with 99 points. These three properties, which are adjacent to each other and were once under the same ownership, clearly benefited in this hotter year from the cooling influence of the Maipo Canyon, not to mention their gravelly and rocky soils near the Maipo River.

The other important factor in 2017 was the human element: picking at the right time and making a careful selection in the winery. Almaviva, for instance, now employs an optical sorting table and discards around 12 percent of the harvest, with a further 45 percent to 55 percent being destined for their second wine, Epu, which mainly sells domestically. Some may think this removes the human touch to an extent, but the stellar results are hard to deny.

Chile wines now more than cabernet and carmenere

What is certain though, is that there is a concerted movement to differentiate and highlight all the various microclimates, varieties and soils that exist up and down the country.

This renaissance to prove that Chile is more than just cabernet and carmenere began over a decade ago among the country’s larger producers and included ventures such as Undurraga’s Terroir Hunter and Lapostolle’s Collection series. It’s clear that Emily Faulconer, technical director at Santa Rita’s Carmen winery in Maipo, is just one of many taking their cues from these pioneers. She’s a woman on a mission to bring the forgotten grape types of Chile to a wider audience.

One of the wines in her experimental range is a fantastic, floral blend of carignan, garnacha and país (Chile’s historic red grape, brought by Spanish missionaries) from a grower in Maule. The other is a delicate and expressive old-vine semillon from Colchagua that, can you believe it, used to go into bulk wine. She even makes a “natural wine” version with no sulphites, Florillón, that sits under flor for six months.

Yet, as we taste together in the company’s historic stately home, now a hotel, in Alto Jahuel, something still seems amiss. All this talk of obscure grape varieties in Chile’s wild, rustic south hardly seems to fit with the grand neoclassical façade through which I entered, draped in its kaleidoscope of flowering plants, nor the lavishly adorned chandeliers that hang from the high ceilings in the grandiose drawing room where we’re now sitting.

After all, I remind myself, Carmen is arguably Chile’s oldest winery, founded in 1850. Santa Rita is a close runner-up in size to Concha y Toro and San Pedro. And apart from anything else, we’re in cabernet territory, aren’t we? But Falconer is unperturbed. “I think these wines are highly relevant and important to our culture,” she tells me. “They represent what happened historically to us. Forget about them for commercial reasons, as that will be negative. The added value for wine is the place, the culture and the tradition.  Diversity in a country is something that makes a country interesting and fun. We can’t all be doing the same thing. I understand how difficult it is for these small vineyards and growers to exist. So that’s where wineries such as Carmen come in.”

While numbers and strong financial backing are vital to the operation of these small-lot projects, it’s the independents who remain the backbone of these initiatives.

Preserving old vines

VIGNO, which stands for Vignadores de Carignan, is now entering its eighth year. The association’s aim is to preserve old-vine carignan in the Maule Valley, and many of the members are tiny in production terms. It’s a quasi-appellation requiring fruit from bush vines that are dry farmed and at least 30 years old. Eighty-five percent carignan is the minimum and it has to be aged for at least two years. Many plots are still ploughed by horse.

“When I arrived in the Maule, we were grafting young cabernet vines onto país and ripping out carignan,” says Julio Bouchon Sr., who set up the VIGNO tasting at his home and winery. “Nowadays, the opposite is happening.”

The silvery-haired septuagenarian is standing against the doorway of his converted farmhouse in a Burgundy sweater, hunting shotgun over his shoulder and a bottle of Champagne in hand. He tells me he’s on his way to Sunday lunch in perfect French, before switching to Italian. The family is originally from the Bordeaux region, and J Bouchon Family Wines is one of a handful of people including Garcia Schwaderer, Gillmore and De Martino making vibrant, edgy carignan under the VIGNO designation.

The cooler-fruit expressions are often from vineyards planted closer to the coast, but the more decadent expressions from the likes of Garage Wine & Co, Undurraga and Morandé are equally exciting. The quirkiest wines of all though are those being made by MOVI.

Of course, there is a fine line between sheer madness and the avant-garde, but there was never a dull moment tasting with the Movimiento de Viñateros Independientes (Movement of Independent Vintners).

The group has grown to 37 producers, unified by their small size and belief that together they can be stronger. This cannot be overstated: big business controls the vast majority of the Chilean wine scene, and teaming together is a question of survival for these intrepid vignerons. Most of the wines are superb.

Sven Bruchfeld is the president of MOVI (which is a lot less grand than it sounds) and in his capacity as owner of the winery Polkura, is walking me through his reds. The calm and collected yet forthright Chilean of German descent is passionate about syrah, and with good reason — his are some of the best in the country. The estate is in the cooler Marchihue area in Colchagua nearer the Pacific, a newer subregion for the valley, where sea breezes and mists often penetrate into the Coastal Range of mountains. Polkura means yellow stone in the ancient Mapuche language and references the amber-colored granite hills that flank the property. Slightly below, Sven farms his Secano vineyard, which is a unique, dry-farmed parcel of head-pruned vines with a little more clay that helps retain water.

“Chile is really syrah country after France,” he says. It’s hard not to agree with him after trying his Secano Syrah. The wine is mesmerising, more reminiscent of a white than a red with fascinating aromas of peaches and persimmon. I’m nearly lost for words as I try to type out a note. This is undoubtedly Chile’s most consistently excellent grape variety, I conclude.