Over the course of any given week, I sample in the neighborhood of 100 wines on average. There are good weeks and bad weeks, and everything in between. My quest, of course, is to identify a wine or two I can recommend. Not every wine, not even every good wine, passes muster.
I need to be moved, to have some emotional connection to what’s in the glass, and I can’t always predict what that will be. So I’m looking back on my tasting notes from last week and there are two wines that I can’t get out of my head, both from Chile.
The South American country boasts a vibrant wine industry that has established an impressive record for quality and value over the past two decades, attributes that make Chilean wines extremely popular in the United States. Chile does a particularly good job with wines at the lower rungs of the price ladder, generally with a fairly generic appellation of origin designation such as “Central Valley.”
But Chile is a vast country with cool coastal valleys that produce outstanding Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc and warmer inland valleys that are ideal for Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and the uniquely Chilean Carmenere, a wine that traces its roots to Bordeaux although the carmenere grape is no longer planted in that part of the world.
These diverse terroirs are the untold story of Chilean wine.
What intrigued me most last week was the 2011 Marques de Casa Concha Chardonnay from Chile’s Limari Valley, located about 250 miles north of Santiago near the Pacific Ocean. The region has been under vine for more than two centuries, but only recently have wineries invested heavily in new vineyards and technology.
The soils of Limari are limestone and clay, which when combined with the cooler climate yield wines of elegance and finesse. The Marques de Casa Concha Chardonnay, which carries an average retail price of $18 at WineSearcher.com, struck me as an outstanding example of the stylistic potential of the wines from Limari. It is crisp and firmly structured while exhibiting notes of spice and lemon crème, with a hint of brioche. And the winemaker, Marcelo Papa, touched on another note.
“I love the minerality I find in this wine,” he told me.
Papa is the chief winemaker for Marques de Casa Concha and also head of production for the more generic wines of Casillero del Diablo, both of which are owned by Concha y Toro, Chile’s largest wine company. The Marques de Casa Concha line focuses exclusively on the diversity of Chilean soil and climate to make wines that reflect authenticity of place.
Whether you are a fan of Chardonnay or not, this vintage of Marques de Casa Concha is a stunner, even moreso because of the price. The suggested retail is $23, but I found it on WineSearcher for as little as $16, with the average price being $18. I would not hesitate to serve it in company with Chardonnay from California or France costing twice as much.
It was just that sort of quality to price ratio that grabbed me when I tasted the 2012 Novas Gran Reserva Pinot Noir later in the week. This is an organic wine made by Spanish winemaker Noelia Orts from grapes harvested in the cool Casablanca Valley near the Chilean port of Valparaiso. Pinot Noir plantings in Chile are in their infancy and there is a large body of work to make meaningful comparisons, but the Novas Gran Reserva demonstrates the potential when the grape is planted in the right place.
Orts, who also makes the biodynamic wines of Emiliana, previously worked at Miguel Torres and Marques de Grinon in Spain before moving to Chile.
“I have a strong belief that Casablanca is the place for Pinot Noir in Chile,” she told me.
The 2012 Novas Gran Reserva Pinot Noir is beautifully balanced, with juicy red-fruit aromas and a firm, crisp structure. Best of all: the price. I found it on WineSearcher for $16. Anyone familiar with the cost of Burgundy or palatable Pinot from Oregon or California must realize this is a remarkable price for a quality Pinot Noir.
With Thanksgiving looming and thirsty friends and family to entertain, this is one wine that should be on every wine enthusiast’s shopping list.
Follow Robert on Twitter at @wineguru.
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