The message from Chilean wine producers throughout my trip has been: head for the hills or the coast – or both.
New vineyard plantations have slowly been moving from the valley floors to the hills or toward the sea for at least six years but the pace seems to have upped in the last year.
If you’ve been reading my previous blogs, you’ll have read that Montes, Ventisquero and Falernia are heading upwards or seawards to find cooler climes. And they’ve all been digging trenches in the vineyards to map the soils before planting.
At Tabali in Limari (500km north of Santiago), they’ve just made the first vintage from a new vineyard in the Fray Jorge national park a stone’s throw away from the ocean. The guys are getting mighty excited about it because they’ve discovered limestone soils, which has been elusive in Chile thus far. The vineyard is enormous and incredibly isolated (giving us time for a cheeky nap in the mini bus en route) but the first harvest of Sauvignon Blanc we tasted was incredible. We all agreed it was almost Loire-like with incredible salty/chalky minerality. The Wine Society have already snapped it up and you really need to try this to see that Chile can do cool climate, mineral whites. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to taste the Pinot Noir or Chardonnay as they’re not yet ready but I’ll be making it a priority.
Surprise surprise they’ve also just bought a vineyard in the mountains, which they’ll plant next year. Everyone is jumping on this bandwagon. It’s up at 2000 metres and the warmer temperatures plus increased UV light on the slopes means they’ll be putting in Carignan, Malbec and Garnacha among other things.
The Elqui valley: home to llamas and Chilean Amarone
Friday 27 November
If you get to the Elqui valley and keep driving for another couple of hours, you’ll hit the fringes of the Atacama desert. It’s hot and arid, cacti pepper the stark mountainsides that tower above the road and without irrigation nothing would grow here. The sun shines 340 days a year so my chances of catching some rays, after our Baltic picnic with Ventisquero the day before, were pretty good.
The Elqui valley is a true valley unlike others like the Maipo valley, which is actually a region. The UV light is incredible and companies are legally obliged to provide sun tan cream and protective clothing for their workers. So, as you can imagine the grapes need a bit of protection too. Winds whistling down the valley from the sea also mean many vines (mainly table grapes) on the valley floor are protected with netting.
It’s mostly table grapes and Pisco production, and wine is fairly new to the scene. Falernia is the major player in the region but other major companies Concha y Toro, San Pedro, Santa Rita are seeing the potential of the region and buying grapes from growers based here.
While most of the vines are on the valley floor near the small town of Vicuna; there is certainly ambition here and they’re planting a new vineyard up at 2000 metres in the Huanta valley. It’s a 45-minute drive from Vicuna up a precarious goldmining road and into the Andes. While it was hot on the valley floor, a cardi was called for up at Huanta. The poor old llamas in one of the fields are going to be homeless when the vines are planted.
Reds will be mainly planted up here – particularly Carmenere and Syrah. That’s not because Cabernet wouldn’t do well here. The company’s Italian winemaker Giorgio Flessati said, “Carmenere and Syrah are our focus because there are too many Cabernet Sauvignons and Merlots in the market.”
The winery makes a dry white PX for Marks & Sparks, which is a quirky idea but a forgettable wine. However, its top Syrah and its Carmenere made in an Amarone style are the stars of the show. Amarone fans should get hold of a bottle and a bar of dark chocolate and enjoy: £10.95, Great Western Wines.
The Chileans are as hardy as the English when it comes to enduring a picnic in freezing conditions. Most days in Colchagua are pretty hot by British standards and you’d think it was a safe bet planning a picnic lunch overlooking the vines. But no. Our poor host Vina Ventisquero was hit by rain and freezing winds in their new Lolol vineyard – just 7km from the sea. Later on, sheets of rain and a power cut put a cat among the pigeons for its outdoor dinner plans.
Despite the elements, we still had a good day and these guys are making massive efforts to understand their soils and sites. They’ve hired terroir specialist Pedro Parra, who always has a hammer in his hand to chip away at the soil, to get to grips with what variety should go where. He’s known as Rocky or Pit for digging trenches (known as calicatas) throughout the vineyard to understand what’s going on underneath the surface as well as using electromagnetic surveys. Parra also consults for Montes, Vina Corpora and many other wineries in Chile and it’s amazing to see the lengths the Chileans are going to, to understand terroir.
The mapping of vineyards throughout the vineyards I visited was amazing and I asked Parra why this was not being used more widely in Europe. “The problem is that people don’t want to understand the science of terroir in France, they like the mystique.”
At Ventisquero’s Lolol vineyard, there’s some exciting, spicy Carmenere being produced by four-year-old vines with no green notes, and it’s pretty restrained. Felipe Tosso, head winemaker at Ventisquero says, “Many people say it’s too old to grow Carmenere here but it’s about fruit load. If you have a lot of fruit then you won’t get it ripe.” Simple enough but it also helps digging hundreds of trenches around the vineyard to find the right clay soils to plant the vines in. Disconcertingly, these trenches are just about the right size to dispose a body.
Head to their Apalta vineyard, also home to Montes, and they’ve planted Carmenere up at altitude. The heavens opened again while we looked at yet another calicata. This year’s block 23 got us all pretty excited. It’s destined for their Vertice label, a blend of Carmenere and Syrah but I’d like to see it bottled as it is.
On my tour of Chile, it seems the country’s winemakers do like to be beside the seaside. The town of Marchigue (pronounced Mar-chee-way), nestled behind the coastal ranges in Colchagua, isn’t much to look at but from the first wines we tasted from Montes’ new vineyard, this could be something special.
The tireless Aurelio Montes Snr and his team first planted vines here in 2001. Today there are 700 hectares
While others have planted nearby, projects have been slowed by a lack of water, the economic crisis and a strengthening currency. The national water authorities won’t let you dig wells to get water unless you have the right papers – and these are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. Montes has also built an artificial lake to catch rain water to irrigate the vines.
Colchagua is best known for its full-on ripe Syrahs, Carmeneres and Cabernet Sauvignons. Marchigue is part of Colchagua but being only 12 miles from the sea, the hairdo-ruining breezes cool the vineyards. Temperatures are estimated to be 10% lower than in the more central Apalta area and harvest here is around two weeks later than in their most prestigious vineyard of Apalta. Bring nearer to the sea, you’d think they’d get more rain too but it’s half of Apalta’s rainfall as it lies in the rainshadow of the coastal range – just like Alsace is protected by the Vosges.
The first wines coming out of these vineyards are really impressive. They’ve planted Malbec, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Carmenere here and despite high alcohols of 14.8% and above (remember these vines are very young), the word that ran through my tasting notes was ‘elegant’.
Check out my youtube video of Montes’ other new project: a Garnacha vineyard planted in Mosel style at a whopping 30,000 vines per hectare.
Bio Bio is a newcomer to the international wine scene and the most southerly winery in Chile, Vina Corpora’s Veranda, is the biggest player in the region by a mile.
This is Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc country and there are interesting things happening with Pinot Noir that could transform the region’s wine scene.
The regional government is currently sponsoring a Pinot-improvement programme with Corpora. They’ve brought in five new clones from UC Davis and Corpora’s Bio Bio viticulturalist Diego Covarrubias, said: “We are a little bit limited with the clones that were brought to Chile a long time ago. I think we can find a much better clone suited to our climate.”
They’re currently using clones including 777 and Covarrubias admitted it made wines that were “uniform” even from diverse sites. “I’m not sure all five of these new clones will be the solution but three could be. We could produce something superb that we are not able to with 777.”
However we’re not going to see wines from the new clones for a while yet. They’re currently in a nursery and won’t be planted out in the fields until 2011 – expect to see the first crops in 2014-ish.
Those that are successful will be made available to quality-oriented growers in the Bio Bio region (but not the rest of Chile) to improve the region as a whole rather than Corpora keeping it for themselves. There’s a terroir study going on simultaneously to find those sites that would be suited to the new and improved Pinot.