|
The
wines of Chile
Part 1: introduction
I’ll admit it. Before I
visited Chile for the first time in January 2008, I was a Chilean wine
sceptic. While I admired Chile’s success in the crowded UK
marketplace, and was impressed by the way Chile was making so many
tasty, affordable wines, I’d never really had any Chilean wines that
I’d considered to be really ‘serious’. My problem with the
high-end Chilean red wines I had experienced was that they all tasted
rather similar, and I could always pick them out as being Chilean in
blind tastings. The taste signature of almost all Chilean reds seemed
to be sweet, pure blackcurrant fruit with some greenness, and it was
all a bit boring. And if I’m going to be a little uncharitable, I
was disillusioned by the expensive icon wines, which just tasted like
more concentrated, sweeter versions of their less expensive peers.
But I’m always willing to
be proved wrong, and I try to keep an open mind. This is why I was
delighted to be invited to take part in the fifth Wines of Chile
annual awards judging, held in Santiago in January 2008. Here was a
chance to taste widely and broadly across all levels of Chilean wine,
and then to visit some of the top producers to see what they were up
to.
It would be very tidy if I
could say now that this 10 day trip blew away my misconceptions about
Chilean wine, and that I discovered dozens of really serious, world
class wines, but I didn’t. However, I did find lots of really good
wines, and came away impressed at the trajectory that Chilean wine is
taking. It’s a work in progress, but Chile is making progress pretty
fast. New vineyard areas are being pioneered; new varieties are being
tried out. Yes, there are still quite a lot of rather boring,
taste-alike red wines, but there’s also a new wave of impressive
mid-priced wines filling in the gulf between the cheap and icon wines.
And Chilean whites are making fast progress. If this work continues,
then the future for Chilean wine looks very bright indeed.
Over the next few weeks
I’ll be writing up my experiences in Chile, trying to capture the
flavour of what is going on here. First, though, a little bit of
background on the Chilean wine industry.
Me
in the Andes, with my preferred form of transport
Chile is a long, thin
country, hemmed in on one side by the Andes, and on the other the
Pacific ocean. Unlike neighbouring Argentina, which uses altitude as a
way to moderate otherwise high summer temperatures, Chile’s key
climatic influence is the sea, which is freezing cold (I tried
swimming in it – a painful experience), cooled by the Humboldt
Current. Between the vineyard areas and the sea lies the coastal
mountain range, and where there are breaks in this coastal range,
formed by river valleys, cool air is sucked in. These air movements
moderate the otherwise warm temperatures, and factors such as
proximity of the coast and the location of valleys determines the
suitability of vineyard sites for particular grape varieties. In
recent years the search has been on for new cooler climate wine
regions with the potential to make more expressive wines from a broad
repertoire of grape varieties. These new wave Chilean wines are now
hitting the marketplace.
Chile’s wine industry
isn’t new. Grapes were first introduced here by Fray Francisco de
Carabantes in 1548, and the first harvest is dated as being a few
years later, in 1555 or 1556. It is estimated that by the end of the 18th
century there were some 15 000 hectares planted, with a growing export
market. The predominant varieties at this stage were the red País and
the white Moscatel de Alejandría, alongside Aceituna, Cristalina
Blanca, Huasquina and Moscatel Rosada. These rather rustic varieties
began to be replaced with more noble varieties in the 19th century. By
the middle of the 1800s there were around 30 000 hectares of vines
here, spread across several regions, and it was during this period
that several important wineries emerged which are still going strong
today, including Errazuriz, Carmen, Santa Rita, Concha y Toro, Cousiño
Macul, San Pedro, Undurraga and Santa Carolina.
Chile’s geographic
isolation meant that it was spared the phylloxera crisis that
devastated most of the world’s wine regions in the late 19th
century. To this day, Chile remains phylloxera free and almost all
Chilean vines are grown on their own roots, rather than grafted onto
rootstocks.
However, from this promising
position, the Chilean wine industry struggled in the latter part of
the 20th century as the state began to interfere with and regulate the
industry. There was also some redistributive land reform that caused
problems for many of the top Chilean wine estates. Domestic
consumption began to drop as people turned from wine to soft drinks
and beer. Then, as the political situation went a bit haywire in the
1970s, the military government caused the industry to stutter further,
with the vineyard area dropping from 106 000 hectares in 1974 to just
54 000 ha in subsequent decades. Things were looking bad.
Everything began to change
in the 1990s, as the Chilean wine industry benefited from a new stable
democracy and a period of economic stability, and Chilean wine enjoyed
a sustained period of growth, achieving great success on foreign
markets. In a period of just a decade exports of bottled wine
increased by a factor of 10 as success brought fresh investment and
further growth. The current state of the industry seems to be one of
innovation, experimentation, pragmatism and growth.
For more background on
Chile, two books are recommended: The wines of Chile, by Peter
Richards (Mitchell Beazley, 2006) and Chilean Wine: The Heritage by
Rodrigo Alvarado (Origo Ediciones, 2004; The Wine Appreciation
Guild).
Back to top
|
