Wine for the Pipas

Southern Chile's Terroir Driven Approach has all the Ingredients to make waves in the Wine World.

Itata's undulating hills and Pine forests as seen from Pedro Parra's vineyards

Chile’s oenological evolution has thrown up a chasm of styles since Tim Atkin famously described it as the Volvo of the wine world 20 years ago. An abundance of solid, yet unspectacular wines sit on UK supermarket shelves, but Chilean wines have struggled to permeate the UK’s finest wine lists. Chile exports over 100 million bottles to the UK a year, yet Trivet doesn’t list a single Chilean wine. The Noble Rot group has just three across its collection of restaurants and shops, and Core by Clare Smyth lists three big name Cabernet blends, with big name prices.

Much of this neglect is self-inflicted. Chile is a geologically diverse nation famed for its poetry, rodeo, and American influenced political disruption. Until recently there’s been a distinct lack of personality on the winemaking front, totally at odds with its idiosyncratic anti-hero poetical past. There are exciting projects popping up all across Chile, but a duo of cool southerly areas, Itata, and Bio Bio are producing some of the most distinctive and enthralling wines the country has to offer, with traditional vinification that utilises old vines, unique soil types and arcane grape varieties. Today's winemaking talent have an atavistic approach, using time-honoured techniques, vessels, and equipment predating the draining of the Medoc’s marshes. This terroir focussed attitude is driving the South away from Chile's perfunctory reputation within the wine trade.

A handful of winemakers are making it their mission to revive Pais, the country’s most planted grape variety until the late 1800s. Vineyards between one and two hundred years old are alarmingly common. Many of these were previously unreachable by car due to overgrown vegetation and pine forests, but are now glowing up with a burst of low intervention winemaking. These regions are cooler and wetter than the Central Valley, with dry farming and a more holistic approach in the vineyard commonplace. Vines are worked by horse & sit on their own rootstocks, as Phylloxera and Chile have never been acquainted.

Itata lies 500km south of Santiago, and is rippling with undulating hills and gnarly, untamed bush vines. Pais and Moscatel grapes were first planted here in the mid 1500s by Spanish invaders. Once a key winegrowing region in Chile, its vineyards were fragmented by the early 1800s war of independence, its waning influence compounded with the arrival of French varieties in the late 19th century. However, this patchwork of wild rolling hills is now teeming with biodiversity, a world away from the Central Valley’s caldera of mundane, monoculture wineries. Itata’s old vines and Pacific influence creates wines with that elusive amalgamation of refreshing drinkability, savoury complexity and affordability. Bio Bio sits just south-east of Itata, resulting a similarly cool climate with a touch less Pacific influence. Both regions are home to thought-provoking wines from ancient ungrafted vines.

Roberto Henriquez produces a handful of delectable old vine Pais across Itata and Bio Bio, using traditional techniques. One of the standouts is ‘Santa Cruz de Coya’, made from a 200-year-old granitic vineyard in the foothills of Bio Bio’s Nahuelbuta Coastal Range. This is Pais that redraws any preconceptions of the variety, pure & fresh with a Chablis-esque energy, redolent of cherry cola, sunshine, and blood-soaked pine needles. The wines are foot stomped, open fermented in lagars, and subsequently matured in a mix of old oak barrels and Pipa, large format barrels made from native Raulí beech wood.

Pedro Parra has a PHD in Terroir and is notorious for digging calcitas, deep pits allowing him to analyse a vineyard’s soil and bedrock structure. Dr Terroir consults for several iconic wineries; Roulot, Comando G, Liger-Belair & Krug to name a few.  His passion project includes old Pais vineyards, producing outrageous value lighter styles, ‘Vinista’, as well as ethereal and structured examples from 130 year old vineyards, ‘Soulpit’. He also produces the country's best Cinsault, across a series of single vineyard gems all named after his jazz heroes: Trane, Monk, Newk, and Hub. Parra uses a proportion of whole bunch and ageing in foudre to reign in Cinsault’s innate fruitiness, aided by the varying forms of decomposing granite his vineyards are based on. These are highly toned aromatic wines with sweet strawberry fruit balanced out by rocky minerality and umami tinged herbaceousness, evocative of great Burgundy with a spicy granite kick.

A Los Vinateros Bravos is headed up by Leo Arazo and has been imported to the UK by Les Caves de Pyrene since 2016. Working with a number of old vineyards across Itata’s mosaic of granite and basalt hills, Leo has an exceptional range of wines at varying price points. His top end single vineyard bottlings are pure and expressive, showcasing the region’s coastal sappy minerality. They include single vineyard Carignan as well as old bush vine Pais and Cinsault. Grapes are all hand harvested with a gentle touch in the winery, employing indigenous yeast fermentations in concrete tanks and eggs. Like many others in the region the wines are gravity bottled with limited sulphur use (15-20ppm).

Their Pipeno series offers a great introduction to the area. Bottled in litre format these are a throwback to the traditional peasant wines of the region, meant for early drinking around a table with friends. The Pipeno Blanco is a blend of Moscatel, Semillon and Corinto (The local synonym for Chasselas), whereas the red is 100% Cinsault. Both wines are fresh, fruit forward easy sippers, with enough structure and savouriness to match up to your Beachside BBQ. The wines are destemmed using Zaranda’s, traditional mats composed of individual bamboo canes, before fermentation and ageing in Pipas.

Ana Maria Cumsille has spent decades working for large commercial wineries in Chile, simultaneously falling in love with the rustic charm of Itata’s vineyards. She produces an array of wines from old vineyards in Itata, including dangerously drinkable Cinsault, Pais, and Carignan, and a surprisingly fresh and elegant Malbec from a vineyard planted in 1800. The pick of her wines though is her skin contact white, made from a blend of Moscatel, Semillon and Torontel. Eight months skin contact and four years in barrel reigns in the explosive peach and apricot aromatics of these grapes, adding in a dried herb and exotic floral elegance. A touch of tannic structure and savoury weight is seamlessly balanced by graceful acidity and tension.

These winemakers are doing their best to put these southerly regions on the map, and interest appears to be in the rise. Monolithic Chilean winemaking operations Vina Ventisquero, De Martino and Torres are producing Pais and Cinsault based blends from Itata fruit, and the Co-op supermarket recently launched its own label Pais. While these wines may lack the character and charm of the hardworking winemakers detailed in this post, they offer an easy access point to these southerly wines for many people. In light of a shifting paradigm in wine taste towards lower alcohol and fresher styles, alongside wines that speak of their place, you can’t do much better than look to Chile’s south for affordable wines with an honest soul.