Chilean Wines Take Manhattan
It's wine'o'clock somewhere.
Writing about wine intimidates The Middlebrow because of the potential for bumbling into the ludicrous while making precious claims about detecting apple blossoms on a dry rose from Provence or the scent of cat piss in a funky white from the Loire Valley (and meaning it as a compliment).
There's also the nagging suspicion that over-indulgence in wine criticism lingo is just a smokescreen for problem drinking. Sideways, the movie and the novel that influenced a couple of generations of appreciative wine drinkers by nudging people towards pinot noir and (unfairly) away from merlot and cabernet franc, is a dark comedy about an alcoholic and his sex-addicted buddy, not a celebration of the lushest parts of a louche life.
Now that I’ve cleared my palette, I am going to write about wine anyway because holding a glass by its stem and putting your proboscis passed the rim and into the bowl, is part of the Middlebrow good life. Last week, I accompanied the Scholar Wife to Sernatur Chile, a tasting of six Chilean wines at Community Wine and Spirits, in Chelsea's art district.
Over a delightful evening seeing pictures of vineyards and hearing about how we could combine a visit to some of them with a larger exploration of Chile, all the way to Bruce Chatwin's Patagonia, we encountered a familiar bottle-- the Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon. This is a fundamental wine. When people tell you that you can get a high quality Chilean cab, with real flavor and food compatibility, for a lot less than you'll pay to buy from California or France, this is what they mean. Depending on where you live, you'll pay high teens to low twenties for this (they have a solid petit syrah as well, around the same price) and it's dependably sippable and savorable.
A few days later, we attended a lunch celebrating Chilean winemaker Don Melchor at New York City's La Copinette, just across from the United Nations. A quick word on the restaurant, which we had not been to before: go. I had a pappardelle ragout on par with anything we had in Milan over the summer and I want to duplicate the Scholar Wife's branzino. I also want to steal their fried tortellini appetizer and have already duplicated their lemon creme fraiche sauce that accompanied it.
Founded in the late 19th century, the Don Melchor winery is devoted to cabernet sauvignon, and has resisted the urge to even expand into carménère, another grape for which Chile is rightly praised.It's nice to see such focus in a world where winemakers large and small all seem eager to tackle everything.
With the guidance of winemaker Enrique Tirado, we tried his 2018, 2019 and 2021 cabs. Tirado has been working with other grapes, specifically cabernet franc, merlot and petit verdot, though these grapes are all used in very small proportions, to augment and accentuate the cabernet sauvignon. Since I really like cab franc on its own (it tends to bring spice, white pepper and Earth) I was not surprised to find that my favorite of the three was the 2019, where the cab franc is bumped up to 5%.
During the small gathering with Tirado, he told us about his winemaking philosophy, which I can briefly summarize as using data science to better and more efficiently run the land and to characterize his grapes, but to always defer to the complexities of human tastes. Winemaking is an art, after all, and so the human experience cannot be crowded out by artificial intelligences. We talked about climate change and how it has not threatened his yields or potential but that it has, over his three decades, caused more extreme events that have shortened decision-making times, forcing their operation to be decisive about harvests. The basics of his environment, which include warm and dry summer days, cooled under moonlight by Andes Mountain winds, remain dependable. He also spoke about biodynamic and organic techniques, which he classified as tools a winemaker may employ when appropriate, alongside traditions that predate our modern regulatory taxonomies.
A day later, we attended Chile Wine Fest New York, a tasting of more than 150 Chilean wines and piscos. Daunted, we resolved to taste only reds, though Chile’s climate does produce some lovely mineral-laden whites. At the tasting, we went back for the 2021 Milla Cala (blend: 68% cabernet sauvignon, 16% carménère, 7% syrah, 5% merlot, 4% cabernet franc) that we adored a few days before at the Senator Chile tasting. The 2019 Lota by Cousino Macul, a blend of 55% cabernet sauvignon and 45% merlot from Alto Maipo, also caught our attention. I freely admit to being overwhelmed as I had not been to a tasting of this size in many years. Beyond the wines, we encountered some piscos made in a brandy fashion that would have had me rethinking piscos if all the reds had left me thinking anything at all…
Then, in a whisp, the Chileans left Manhattan, off to spread their news to other parts of the world, their major markets being the US, Brazil and China these days. The typical take on Chilean wine is that it’s a value play for the savvy wine drinker on a budget and that remains true — you can almost certainly get quality Chilean table wine at prices that will get you only swill from California. What is less understood is that this value proposition seems to hold all the way up the line where premium wines, finely crafted and up for competition with the cultiest California crus can still be had a a steep relative discount.
Cheers!