Great Sauvignon Blancs from Chile

Errazuriz’s Manzanar Vineyard in the Aconcagua Costa -photo courtesy of the winey.

Recently I have been getting more interested in Sauvignon Blanc than ever before, probably because of my trip around New Zealand last year – more of which soon.

Many people instantly think of New Zealand or France’s Loire Valley as the best places to find good wines made from Sauvignon Blanc and of course they are not wrong – New Zealand, especially but not only Marlborough,  Sancerre, Pouilly-Fumé and other parts of the Loire can all produce outstanding wines made from Sauvignon. However, they are not alone.

Over the Christmas period, and since, in a vain attempt to get a feel of Summer, I have been enjoying some Sauvignon Blancs from Chile and the wines that really stood out were these – in a way they are my Wines of the Week for January so far.

Map of Chile – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

2014 Leyda Single Vineyard Garuma Sauvignon Blanc
DO Valle de Leyda
Viña Leyda
Chile

I really admire Viña Leyda, they carved their estate out of virgin territory and put a new region on the wine map of Chile. What a region it is too, with almost no coastal mountains between it and the Pacific, it gets the full effects of the cooling wind from the ocean. This delays ripening and allows the grapes to hang on to more acidity than they otherwise would. Acidity, of course, gives the finished wine freshness and zest – which are the hallmarks of good Sauvignon Blanc.

The grapes come from two parcels in a single south-west facing block, so away from the sun and cool. It is called Garuma after the local word for the Grey Gull that is widely seen around here. It is hard harvested and they made two passes through the vineyard, one quite early to get the fresh, zesty, acidic character and the other for 70% of the wine, twelve days later to capture the ripe fruit characters. 6% was fermented in old French oak barrels, so gave no oak flavour, but added texture to the palate as well as some weight and a touch of complexity. The wine was also aged for six months on the lees in stainless steel tank to add complexity and depth. They only grow Davis Clone 1, the same as the Sauvignon Blanc clone overwhelmingly grown in New Zealand.

Viviana Navarrete the talented winemaker at Viña Leyda – photo courtesy of The Winebow Group, Leyda’s US importer.

I liked it from the first sniff. The nose was richly citric, grapefruit and grapefruit pith, with something creamy and tropical as well. There was even the classic blackcurrant leaf aroma and a touch of something herbal, green tea or fennel perhaps? The palate had this lovely zing of acidity that cut through it all, but then there was this richer, weightier mouhfeel that makes it really delicious. The promised creamy quality came through on the palate, as did those herbs and ripe green fruit, which made it feel juicy and then the acidity and a dash of something mineral made it feel fresh and lively.

I enjoyed this an an aperitif as well as with some spicy prawns. I especially liked the way it was bone dry, but with wonderful concentration of ripe, green fruit balancing any austerity – 91/100 points

Available in the UK for around £13 per bottle from: 
Great Western Wine, Winedirect and The Drink Shop.
For US stockists click here or contact The Winebow Group.

2016 Montes Outer Limits Sauvignon Blanc
DO Zapallar
Viña Montes
Chile

Montes are another Chilean producer that I respect very much, indeed I visited their winery some years ago and was very impressed by their vineyards and their wines. In the years since though they, like many other quality conscious Chilean producers, have really expanded their horizons.They no longer just grow grapes in Colchagua and Casablanca, but are exploring Chile for new places to plant grapes and produce ever better wines. Their desire for world class white wines – and Pinot Noir in fact – has taken them to Zapallar, which is a small holiday resort some 40 km north of Valparaiso. Like Casablanca Zapallar is a sub-zone of the Aconcagua Valley and like Aconcagua Costa, Leyda and Casablanca it benefits from the full cooling effects of the Pacific. The cold nights and the foggy mornings ensure a long growing season and fresh acidity.

The vineyard is about 5 miles inland and Montes have the region – or sub region – to themselves. The vines are planted at around 150 metres above sea level and that modest height helps the maritime influence. Interestingly, although they do grow Davis Clone 1, they also grow some French Sauvignon Blanc clones.

Zapallar, Chile – photo courtesy of srossi.it.

The vintage was cool for Chile, which delayed the hardest by some twelve days. The juice was fermented in stainless steel tanks at low temperatures – between 10˚ and 12˚C – and the wine was aged on the lees for 6-8 months.

I loved this too, it was piercingly fresh and lively with a zesty lime aroma, pink grapefruit, a touch of tomato stem, some stony mineral notes and a whiff of the sea, or something saline anyway. The palate was more brisk and zingy with piecing acidity and crunchy green fruit as well as something like snow peas. Interestingly it had twice as much sugar as the Leyda wine – 4.62 grams per litre as opposed to just under 2 – but it didn’t show because of the refreshingly  high acidity. This was delicious, very refreshing and made a wonderful aperitif and went superbly with spicy food – 92/100 points.

Available in the UK for around £14 per bottle from: 
Winedirect, Corking Wines, Toscanaccio, The Fine Wine Company and Brook & Vine.
For US stockists click here.

The Manzanar Vineyard – photo courtesy of the winery.

2015 Errazuriz Aconcagua Costa Sauvignon Blanc
DO Aconcagua Costa
Viña Errazuriz
Chile

Errazuriz are another great producer who produce a wide range of high quality wines. They were founded in 1870 and remain family owned, but for the last 20 years or so have focussed on finding the best vineyard sites for specific grape varieties. For white wines this increasingly means they grow their grapes in their Manzanar Vineyard in the cool coastal area of the Aconcagua Valley where the Aconcagua River empties out into the Pacific just north of the holiday resort of Viña del Mar, itself just to the north of Valparaiso.

The wine is fermented in stainless steel tanks at low temperatures using aromatic yeast and was aged on the lees for three months to give more weight and complexity.

This cool, coastal area, which produces lovely Sauvignon and Chardonnay – as well as Pinot Noir and Syrah, is pretty new, but the results are extremely good. Like Montes, Errazuriz grow a range of Sauvignon clones and they manage to produce an incredibly fresh and lively wine with zesty citrus aromas, fresh, leafy herbs, tomato stem, lemon grass and a touch of passion fruit. The palate was bone dry, with crisp acidity, something salty, taut minerality and zesty green fruit. This is a bracing and refreshing Sauvignon that makes a superb aperitif and is perfect with smoked salmon, goats cheese and any light meal or seafood. I enjoyed it very much – 91/100 points.

I would add that the less expensive Errazuriz Estate Series Sauvignon Blanc, also from the Aconcagua Valley, is also a very good wine.

Available in the UK for around £12 per bottle from: 
Waitrose, Winedirect, The Vinorium, Cheers Wine Merchants, Stone, Vine & Sun, Corking Wines, Hawkshead Wines, The Drink Shop and HTF Wines.
For US stockists contact Vintus, Errazuriz’s importer.

In the interests of total disclosure I must mention that I sometimes do some work for Viña Errazuriz, however the above is my honest and unsolicited opinion.

All three of these were very good wines indeed, but what made them especially interesting is all of them came from wine regions that simply didn’t exist 20 years ago. So many things that we take for granted in modern wine are actually really new and just go to show that there are almost certainly plenty of other new regions just waiting to be discovered.

 

Wine of the Week – a Chilean Star is Born

It is early days for Chilean sparkling wines, there are a few very nice examples, but so far they aren’t exactly filling the shelves. Which is a pity as most of the Chilean sparklers that I have tasted are very enjoyable indeed.

Maule Valley Vineyards.

Recently I showed a lovely one at a really well received tasting of Chilean wines. I have liked it for a long time, but it met with such approval that I have made it my Wine of the Week.

Map of Chile – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

Santa Digna Estelado Rosé Brut
Bodegas Miguel Torres Chile
Secano Interior
Maule
Chile

This wine is made from País, the grape that was for centuries the work horse grape of Chile. It has been ignored somewhat in recent decades, but the south of Chile is home to some impressively old plantings – over 200 years old in many cases – so Miguel Torres Maczassek, the son of famous Spanish winemaker Miguel Torres and nephew of Marimar Torres, set about giving these long neglected vines a whole new lease of life. The local growers who owned these venerable vineyards had for a long time only been able to sell the grapes at low prices to go into cheap everyday wines, but Torres wanted to rescue it from this obscurity and create a wine that would give the growers a good return. This would also save this fantastic resource of old vine material and put them to good use, it really was a virtuous circle.

The ancient bush vines being tended.

The resulting wine is a traditional method pink sparkling wine called Estelado. The vines are very old and come from a clutch of independent growers in Cauquenes, Rauco and Curepto in Maule which is well to the south of Chile’s famous wine regions. However, Chile’s south is on the up nowadays and it is the large plantings of old País, Carignan, Mourvèdre, Muscat and Cinsault that is attracting interest and helping with this dramatic Renaissance.

The base wine is cold fermented and after the second fermentation it is aged on the lees for 12 months.

It is a lovely delicate, coral, rose colour with aromas of redcurrant, blackcurrant and leafy, wild herbs. The palate is fresh and lively with a sort of blackcurrant cream character, redcurrant, rose petals, biscuits and blood orange as well as a savoury, herbal, earthy character that is typical of País in my limited experience. This is a really enjoyable and drinkable sparkling wine. I liked it very much as did the people at my tasting – 89/100 points.

Available in the UK for around £12 per bottle – for stockists click here – more stockist information is available from the UK distributor, John E Fells.
For US stockists click here.

Wine of the Week 35 – all change in Chile

Recently I presented a tasting that I found exciting and that seemed to go down rather well with the attendees. My topic was Chile’s emerging Regions and Styles and it was  a wide ranging – or at least as wide as you can get in 8 wines – look at how Chile is changing.

For a long time Chile has been regarded by many consumers as a safe option. They made reliable wines at good prices, offering good value for money and lots of pleasure and you would have thought that might be enough for Chilean wine producers. However no one with any ambition wants to just be seen as a safe option for ever and this especially true of Chile’s new generation of talented winemakers.

Chile is most definitely on the move and you can see it wherever you look at Chilean wines. New grape varieties are the most obvious personification of this change, but scratch the surface a little and you can see it everywhere. Lots of things are going on in Chile right now, including:

Earlier picking is resulting in wines with more zip and freshness – something that only confident grape growers who know exactly what they are doing can pull off.

Less use of new oak – and less American oak too – is very apparent in recent vintages of Chilean wine, again confidence is behind this, they do not feel the fruit needs as much help – or masking – as it did in the past.

Map of Chile – click for a larger view – non watermarked PDF versions are available by agreement.

New regions are emerging – or becoming established in some cases – which help the grape growers and wine makers to match a grape variety or wine style with a specific terroir that suits it. Included in this roster would be these regions to the North of Santiago; Limarí, Elqui (over 500KM north of Santiago) and Choapa in the north, although the Atacama region even further north is beginning to produce exciting things too. In the area around Santiago you have the Aconcagua Valley which includes the new Aconcagua Costa as well as Valle de Leyda – both cool places by the ocean for white wine, Pinot Noir and Syrah production. The new regions in the south would include the Itata and Malleco Valleys.

Parallel to this is the move to categorise Chile’s wine regions as Coastal / Costa – where the cool conditions from the Pacific suit Chile’s hugely exciting white wines. The Andes zone is a less established move to plant vineyards higher up in the Andes than is traditional in Chile, the results look promising and not just for white wines either. Between these two is the Entre cordilleras zone between the Andes and the Coastal Mountain range which includes much of the Valle Central as well as many of the emerging regions.

Another fascinating example of creativity in Chile is the current widespread delight in finding the pockets of truly old vine material that the country has. For the last 30 years or so Chile has focussed on giving the world the grapes they want – and that sell – so the vineyard regions around Santiago, the traditional heart of Chile’s wine industry have very few old vines, hardly ever older than 20 years in fact. Chile does though have old vines, especially in the more rural south of Curicó, Maule and Itata where time has stood still somewhat as the vineyards are owned by smallholder farmers down there who cannot afford to uproot their vines as trends change, with the result that they have plenty of old vines, but of grape varieties that has not interested Chile’s producers until recently. The main grapes that fall into this category are País, Moscatel, Cinsault and Carignan, together with a little Mourvèdre and they are producing some astonishingly good wine.

Actually all the wines I showed were very good and seemed top meet with approval from most people there, but the majority agreed on what was the wine of the night and so I have made it my Wine of the Week.

Maule Valley Vineyards.

2008 Éclat Old Vine Blend
Viña Valdivieso
D.O. Valle de Maule

Valdivieso are an old established winery who originally set out to be Chile’s sparkling wine specialist, but who turned to red wines from the 1980s onwards with spectacular results. Always seeking new challenges, their chief winemaker, the charming Brett Jackson – a kiwi living and working in Chile and who introduced me to the delights of drinking Caipirinhas one wonderfully drunken evening – decided to create a wine using the old vine Carignan that can be found in the Maule Valley and that has traditional been used for everyday wines that does not get exported. Brett saw the potential and produces a wine that is quite unlike what people expect from Chile, but that is really superb. The blend changes, but this vintage is 65% Carignan – dry farmed / unirrigated 80 year old plus bush vines with 20% Mourvèdre and 15% Syrah. The finished wine is aged for 12 months in French oak barrels.

Although Carignan is really a Spanish grape and should be called Cariñena, the grape arrived in Chile from france in the twentieth century and so is always called Carignan there. A whole group of producers have now seen the worth of these old vines and have created a group called the Vignadores de Carignan, or Vigno to market these wines and to give some rules for their use. For instance to be a member the wine must have at least 65% Carignan in the blend. The vines must be at least 30 years old, they must be dry farmed bush vines and must be aged for at least 24 months – in bottle, barrel (old or new) or amphoras / tinajas.

On a night of good wines, this stood out to me. It was still a youthful deep, earthy ruby to look at with no browning yet. The nose was concentrated and spicy, with floral tones, earthy, leathery and coffee too, as well as quite a whack of alcohol – the wine is 14.5%. The palate was medium bodied and smooth with rich dried fruit, even some dried fruit sweetness there as well as a lovely fresh, bracing lift of acidity. There was mushrooms and truffles, together with a smoky, leather quality, that touch (just a touch, but I like it) of mocha and a firm touch of tannin on the finish that tightened the wine up in a way I like, but which also shows it could age for longer. If you like Shiraz or Syrah wines or Rhône style blends then this is a wine you should try – 91/100 points.

Available in the UK for around £15 per bottle from – stockists information here.
Available in the US for around £30 per bottle from – stockists information here.

This really is a lovely wine and if some of the recent developments in Chile have passed you by, then this could be an excellent place to start experiencing them.