Wine Day January 8th

Apologies for the typos and grammatical errors but we’re just back from a 240 km, 10 hour, four winery tour that was simply spectacular.

Our host, Mick, is a young American who, after a short pro snowboarding career, settled in Chile and has become an excellent trained sommelier specializing in exploring some of the boutique wineries in the Maipo Valley south of Santiago in addition to one or two of the big guys.

We began at the Antiyal winery, a small family run enterprise that is focused on biodynamic practices. Biodynamic wines are similar to organic wines, except they’ve gone several steps further and created a whole fertile ecosystem around the vineyard. Essentially, biodynamic wines begin from the soil the grapes grow in. Like organic wines, no synthetic intervention is used. The vineyard itself is a biodynamic farm involving self-sustainable uses of manure, flora and fauna. Everything is determined from a strict calendar, from planting to harvesting and takes takes into account lunar cycles as well as the position of the sun and planets. It sounds a bit much but, it works extremely well.

Back in the car and off to the Santa Rita winery which is anything but a boutique affair. It’s one of the largest wine firms in Chile and exports masses of product to North America. Mick continued to walk us through proper tasting techniques and how to discern various features of each wine. His selections from the large set of offerings were excellent across the board.

Onward ever onward to Haras de Pirque winery which was built on the site of a very successful thoroughbred horse farm. The owner took up wine making, converted most of the farm to vines and has created an incredible facility producing award winning wines. The on-site restaurant was great and we enjoyed, you guessed it, a glass of wine paired to our menu choices. Fantastic.

Then it was down into the production facilities to learn their processes.

The barrel room was special and the tasting room even more so. The latter was located under a fountain which then formed a skylight.

By now we were a bit wobbly given the tasting pours were usually about 5 ozs and we were hesitant to leave a drop untouched. The spittoons remained bone dry. Our last stop was the William Fevre winery shop which was an intimate setting not adjacent to the vine fields. Mick made up a cheese and chocolate platter to show how flavours could change based on food pairings. It was eye opening.

Four wineries, the equivalent of nearly 7 glasses of wine each and a newfound appreciation for Chilean wines and the interesting people in the industry. A great day indeed.