Vina Undurraga

Last sunday we took a bus out of the city for our first vineyard visit! You will almost certainly know a couple of the larger vineyards exporting wine out of Chile, Vina Undurraga is one of the smaller ones though still well marketed.

the team

inside the grounds

There are several wine-growing areas in Chile, Vina Undurraga is located in the Maipo Valley just an hour or so out of Santiago. The gardens, below, were designed by the same landscape architect (Pierre Dubois) who designed the layout of Santiago's Parque Forestal which we described in a previous post.

the landscaped gardens

This vineyard has made connections (and commercial arrangements) with communities of the largest surviving group of indigenous people in Chile - the Mapuche. More on them another time - as you might imagine, Mapuche culture is very popular in Chile, but the reality is that these communities are still recovering from many decades of economic marginalisation.

Some of the Mapuche symbols in Vina Undurraga:

you can see the steps up the pole - the shaman would sit on the top and enter a trance

totem pole

Onto the grapes! Because of the location and soil here, this vineyard mainly produces red wines, though they do produce some chardonnay and sauvignon blanc.

At the head of each of these rows of vines is a rosebush. These have been used since around the 1920's as disease/ pest alarms - they are very susceptible, in fact even more so, to the same diseases as grapevines. So when a rosebush gets sick they immediately rip up the surrounding vines to prevent the disease spreading through the whole farm. We did not know that!

see the little rosebush to the right

The vines are kept low and splayed out like this to ensure maximum sun exposure and to stop the vine using all of its energy in growing tall.

monkey puzzle!

instead of feet

They oak the wines in French or American oak, sometimes both.

And finally we got some drinks! We can happily report that we enjoyed all of the wines we tried. You can't really go wrong if you can find any of these wines, but one to look out for is a carmenere. This is the signature Chilean grape, originally brought over from Bordeaux in the 1850's by growers thinking it was Merlot. In the 1870's a disease destroyed all of the carmenere in Europe and everyone thought that it had become extinct - but it was later rediscovered in Chile when growers realised that what they were growing wasn't merlot!

So, a true New World wine in the sense that it was only grown here and in the sense that it is synonymous with Chile in the same way that say Malbec is with Argentina and Pinotage with South Africa. All of these grapes have been grown in Europe but in each case there is something particular about the climate or geography of their adopted New World home which makes them grow better there. In the case of Chile it's probably the sun, which is like nothing we've ever experienced. 

The first of many vineyard trips hopefully!

Chao!