By CHARLES RUNNETTE
Discover the grape feared gone for good on Chile’s Andean flank.
There’s a STORY in Chile that anyone vaguely related to the wine industry – and I mean all of them – wants every visitor to hear. It’s about how this onetime wine-making lightweight of a country unknowingly saved one of the world’s most coveted varieties from extinction, and it always starts with the question, “Do you know the story of carménère?”
Speeding along the Pan-American Highway out of Santiago, Chile’s charm-challenged capital, my ruggedly handsome guide, Agustin Landeta, starts in on the legend of carménère. As a former production manager at Concha y Toro, perhaps Chile’s best-known winery, Agustin knows the business. He also knows that despite all the fuss about Chilean wines in recent years, few people outside the country understand how it changed the course of drinking history.
“Carménère is a grape that came from France in the nineteenth century. But then we, as a country, forgot it was here,” he says. “When the phylloxera plague killed all the vines in Europe, this delicious grape was thought wiped out. Gone from the planet.” Agustin motions dramatically, letting both hands slip from the wheel and causing the car to drift toward the walls of vines whizzing past on either side. We’re just minutes out of town, but already vineyards blanket the gently sloping hills as far as the eye can see.
Stretching 2,700 miles from Peru to Tierra del Fuego along South America’s westernmost edge, this ribbon-shaped country should be world renowned for its surfeit of natural wonders – the moonscaped Atacama Desert; Patagonia’s Torres del Paine; the pristine, volcano-riddled Lake District; mysterious Easter Island. Yet the one thing that finally put it on many travelers’ maps is an import: wines that blend carménère with the original grapes dragged across the ocean by sixteenth-century conquistadors and missionaries.
Over the past 450 years, those carpetbagging vines have put down deep roots in Chilean life, but only recently has wine moved from a lucrative product to a source of national pride. When a carménère-based blend, Clos Apalta Colchagua Valley 2005, was named the top wine in the world by Wine Spectator last year, it proved a watershed moment. As when California’s wines beat out France’s wines in the famous 1976 blind taste test chronicled in last year’s movie Bottle Shock, Chile’s have finally broken into the club and assumed their position in the world’s most exclusive cellars.
Like Atlanta in the South‚ to reach anywhere in Chile, travelers must first transit Santiago. Though it will never win any beauty contests against its cross-Andes rival, Buenos Aires, vibrant, prosperous Santiago (called “Sanhattan” by the wealthier locals) surprises many visitors with its L.A. feel. The sprawling city boasts a wide variety of distinct neighborhoods, each with its own set of excellent restaurants and hotels. In the parlance of New York, Las Condes is the tony Upper East Side of Santiago, Providencia and Bellavista its Greenwich Village and Soho, and Parque Forestal its Central Park. Santiago is worth exploring, but for this trip, a winetasting tour of the many vineyards orbiting the city, it takes a back seat.
First a lay of the land: Generally speaking, the warmer valleys immediately adjacent to Santiago and to the south – Colchagua, Maipo, Curicó, Cachapoal, and Maule – are best known for their reds. The valleys known for their world-class whites are for the most part farther from the city and closer to the Pacific Ocean, where cooler nights make for sharper, more complex vintages. Of those, the two producing premier wines are Casablanca and the emerging, biodynamic-friendly San Antonio Valley just a few miles from the ocean – which is where I started my most recent tour of Chilean wine country earlier this year.
When not gesturing wildly about Chile saving the world from life without carménère, Agustin is driving me to three valleys over the course of a few days: San Antonio, where we’ll see Matetic and Casa Marin; Casablanca, for Veramonte and Casas del Bosque; and Colchagua, south of the city, for tours of Montes, Casa Silva, and Casa Lapostolle’s Apalta Winery.
I’ve written about Chile for ten years now, and never has the wine culture been a more vibrant and essential part of the country’s image. The first clue that things have changed since my last visit: the four-page wine list handed to me on the national airline, LAN, featuring a cabernet sauvignon blend from one of the country’s best young vineyards. The Altaïr Sideral, a spicy, nutty blend of cabernet sauvignon, carménère, and cabernet franc, is a rare delight when spotted on a wine list at an excellent restaurant, so to have it on a plane is quite a shock. There’s even a sommelier to recommend which wines pair best with meals (I took whatever went with the Altaïr).
After a night in Santiago, we head to the San Antonio Valley for two relatively new wineries highly regarded by oenophiles. First up: Matetic, started in 1999 by a prominent Croatian-Chilean family. Starting a winery is a common practice among well-to-do Chileans (so they have bottles with the family name to serve to their friends), but most families don’t take their wine as seriously as the Matetics. Beautifully set in a private valley within the San Antonio region, it’s the perfect place for a winery that doesn’t want its vines “infected” by runoff from other vineyards. The family went to great lengths to implement biodynamic and organic practices.
The result is near-universal praise for Matetic wines, particularly the award-winning EQ Sauvignon Blanc, which has notes of tropical fruits and citrus and a vibrant acidity balanced with a little wood for a fresh and elegant wine. Matetic also has one of the best restaurants – all-organic, of course – in the area, where chef Matías Bustos selects locally harvested ingredients for modern interpretations of traditional Chilean dishes.
The second spot not to miss in San Antonio is Casa Marin, an even smaller family-run vineyard. Though not quite as visually stunning as Matetic, this charming boutique winery is the creation of one woman, whose abiding passion for wine drove her to make some of the most daring, interesting, and widely praised vintages in the world. “I want to make enduring classics, not Hollywood blockbusters,” says founder, owner, and winemaker María Luz Marin. A small woman chicly dressed in jeans and a pressed shirt, she’s extremely involved in every aspect of her winery, to the point of harvesting the grapes by hand with her son at her side. The care she and her family show from vine to bottle is finding great success: Casa Marin’s bright, crisp sauvignon gris is the most talked-about pure example in all of Chile and features a perfect balance of seductive oak and complex fruit.
Back on the road, Agustin gives me the rundown on the country’s five wine regions and rattles off dates and statistics about each. “This valley has traditionally been a chardonnay and sauvignon blanc area, but now it’s producing some world-class syrahs, and pinot noirs too,” he says when we reach the Casablanca Valley, seemingly stunned by his own news. “Chile may be a syrah country!”
For an evolving area first planted in 1982, Casablanca has already made a name for itself as one of the best wine discoveries in recent history. Many of the foremost Chilean wineries call it home; we’re here to visit two. The first is chic Casas del Bosque, where we settle in at a stylishly modern restaurant, Tanino, for chef Álvaro Larraguibel’s five-course menu, featuring Ecuadorian shrimp sautéed in honey and olives paired with the winery’s acclaimed Sauvignon Blanc Gran Reserva, and beef fillet wrapped in prosciutto alongside the delicious cool-climate Syrah Gran Reserva. As fantastic as the food is, the wine up-stages it – particularly the peppery syrah.
On the way back to Santiago, we drop by another Casablanca Valley highlight, Napa-esque Veramonte. Frequent comparisons to California’s wineries persist because the Chilean-born owner, Agustin Huneeus, who now lives in the Bay Area, gathered many of his ideas for this powerhouse when working in Napa and Sonoma. He started at Concha y Toro, moved to the United States during Pinochet’s regime to run Franciscan Estates, and returned to Chile as one of the pioneering vintners in the Casablanca Valley. It’s not the most charming vineyard, but it’s impressive and definitely worth a stop for the lauded sauvignon blanc and the cabernet, merlot, and carménère blend called Primus, both of which are available in the States.
I plan to take a night off wine at The Ritz-Carlton, Santiago before moving on to Chile’s full-bodied-red country. But I break down and hit its famed bar, Wine 365, for tapas and a preview from sommelier Magda Saleh: Montes’ Alpha M from Colchagua and a Viñedo Chadwick from the Maipo Valley.
Earlyish the next morning, Agustin and I head two hours south to the steamy Colchagua Valley. Despite what Mendoza fans may think, this has become South America’s preeminent appellation. Declared Wine Region of the Year in 2005 by Wine Enthusiast, it’s home to Chile’s celebrated big-bodied red grapes (including the bulk of the country’s fairy-tale carménère vines) and what’s recognized as one of the world’s best wines, Casa Lapostolle’s Clos Apalta.
The air thick with heat, we peel off the Pan-American Highway at the two-lane Carretera del Vino (the Wine Route) and wind our way past sleepy Santa Cruz to the heart of the region, where the terroir infuses the grapes with tannins that impart a signature rich and almost chocolaty taste to the wine. (One thing to watch out for, however, is the other main quality of Colchagua wine: higher alcohol levels, which top 15 percent in some cases.)
Agustin pulls the car over at Montes, Chile’s original superpremium success story, founded more than 20 years ago by Aurelio Montes and two friends and now one of the largest exporters of wine to the States. Low-slung on the landscape, the new modern winery is a testament to the label’s global popularity. Visitors can watch the gravity-flow winemaking process in action and take a tractor tour through the vineyards to an observation deck overlooking the Apalta micro-valley, then head back to the tasting room to try the results (the Montes Alpha M and the Folly are great). Finally, be sure to try Aurelio’s personal favorite, Purple Angel, a blend of 92 percent carménère and 8 percent petit verdot.
We move from one of Chile’s newest wineries to one of its oldest, Casa Silva, which was originally planted by Frenchman Emile Bouchon in 1892 and churned out bulk wines for the Bouchon-Silva family for the better part of a century. Then, in 1997, Mario Pablo Silva and his father refocused the vineyard on quality. Walking around the winery and the estate grounds and polo field is a journey through mission-style whitewashed adobe walls and dark wood furniture. Casa Silva has aged, but it doesn’t look weathered, and it’s a wonderful example of some of Chile’s great wines that don’t make it to the U.S.
Our final stop in Colchagua is Casa Lapostolle’s magical Apalta vineyard, which resembles a giant bird’s nest perched on the hillside. It took four years and $10 million to blast away tons of granite and build the stunning gravity-flow Clos Apalta Winery.
Unlike many vineyards in other countries, most of Chile’s wineries prefer visitors to make reservations for tastings. At Apalta, they’re a requirement – it simply can’t handle large groups. Though casual wine lovers will enjoy it, tasting at Apalta costs about double its neighbors; for serious oenophiles, however, this is Chile’s new pilgrimage spot.
Founded by Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle (part of the family that owns Grand Marnier) in 1994, the winery blends strict French techniques with some of the oldest cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and carménère vines in the valley. A young and enthusiastic winemaker and Casa Lapostolle ambassador, Diego Urra, meets us for a tour of the facility. We descend into the hillside, swirling down a grand Guggenheim-esque six-story staircase as Diego points out the grape receiving and sorting area up top, the maceration level, the fermentation level, and finally, the blending and bottling area. By avoiding the aggressive pumps that most wineries use to move wine from tank to tank, Apalta claims to produce calmer, better-tasting wines.
After the tour, it’s time to see if that claim is true. Diego sets up glasses in the tasting room – the last one is what I came to Chile for, Clos Apalta. He walks me through their delicious lineup: the mineral- and citrus-tinged Cuvée Alexandre Chardonnay, the juicy and red fruit aromas of the Casa Merlot, the black-fruited and peppery Casa Cabernet Sauvignon, and the tobacco- and mocha-nosed Cuvée Alexandre Cabernet Sauvignon. Then we get to it, the Clos Apalta, and sure enough, as I am sipping it Diego mentions that it’s a blend of carménère, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, and petit verdot. I look up, thinking, “Not him.”
Seconds later, he says it: “Have you heard the story about carménère?”
I almost spit out the wine laughing, but I’ve been waiting too long for this. So I smile, nod, and enjoy a wonderful wine made from the grape that – let me tell you – Chile saved from near extinction.
Essence of the Andes
Taste Chile’s carménère with a malbec back.
Getting there
Fly nonstop to Santiago from New York (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday) and Miami (daily) on LAN Airlines. The airline also offers daily connecting service from Los Angeles via Lima, Peru.
Stay
On the city’s tony east side, San Cristobal Tower, Santiago features 139 butler-serviced rooms within walking distance of the Providencia neighborhood’s cafés and boutiques, and L’Étoile Restaurant, which presides on the 21st floor with panoramic views of the city. Doubles from $489, including breakfast.
Guests at The Ritz-Carlton, Santiago can explore the exclusive El Golf neighborhood and return to catch the sunset from the 205-room property’s rooftop spa. Save time for Wine 365, one of the city’s top wine bars, with 365 Chilean selections to choose from, including 24 by the glass. Doubles from $348, including breakfast and a 30-minute massage.
Recently renovated, the Grand Hyatt Santiago, in the middle of the city’s Las Condes neighborhood, boasts a large pool area, spa and fitness facility, and tennis courts. The best rooms, at the top of the circular building, have views of the majestic Andes. Doubles from $248, including breakfast, club lounge access, and a $100 dining credit.
Ways to Go
Travelers taste their way across the continent on Ladatco Tours’ 15-day journey from Santiago to Buenos Aires. The route takes in four of Chile’s finest valleys (Casablanca, Rosario, Colchagua, and Maipo) before crossing over the Andes for four days in malbec heaven, Mendoza. Departures: Any Wednesday through 2009; from $9,400, including most meals and economy airfare from Miami.
Discover Matetic, Casa Marin, Altaïr, Casa Lapostolle, and more of Chile’s top wineries on Abercrombie & Kent’s gourmet pilgrimage from Santiago to Buenos Aires. The 11-day trip begins with a cooking class in Santiago and includes four days of tasting in the surrounding valleys. Parties head to Mendoza for vineyard visits and the chance to blend, bottle, and label their own wine. Departures: Any day through March 31, 2010; from $12,287, including most meals.