Chile — pre-phylloxera plonk
THE British wine trade is not happy unless it discovers a new wine country every couple of years. Spain, Bulgaria, Califor- nia and Australia have had their vogues, and in some cases are still enjoying them: now the talk of the town is Chile. The Masters of Wine, who include many of The Masters of Wine, who include many of the country's leading buyers, went en masse to Chile in March; despite contract- ing Montezuma's, or Pinochet's revenge, they seem to have come back quite im- pressed, and there is no doubt that we will see Chilean wines more widely distributed and and vociferously promoted over the coming months (the Chilean government is stepping in with a generic advertising campaign).
The idea that Chile is a 'new' wine country is of course absurd. Spanish mis- sionaries brought vine cuttings as they did to every part of New Castile. The first vintage in Chile was gathered in the 1550s. The history of quality wine production in Chile is more recent but still over a century old: Don Silvestre Ochagavia Errazuriz employed a French expert to plant Borde- lais vines on his property outside Santiago in 1851.
The valleys of central Chile, dry but irrigated by water from the Andean gla- ciers, with warm days and cool nights, offer favourable, perhaps ideal conditions for viticulture. Hugh Johnson has called Chi- lean cabernet sauvignon 'one of the great natural resources of the planet'. The most distinctive feature of Chilean viticulture is the absence of pests — in particular of phylloxera vastratrix, the vine aphid which wiped out all the European vineyards in the 1870s and 1880s but has never suc- ceeded in crossing the Andes. The adver- tising campaign for Chilean wines makes great play with this fact, though its rele- vance is not entirely clear to me. Phylloxera-free and therefore ungrafted vines will live, in theory, much longer than the grafted vines with which the European vineyards are planted. Old vines certainly make for higher quality. But an average age of 25 years, quoted to me by one Chilean producer, is not especially im- pressive. In any case, the advantage of pre-phylloxera vines could only be consi- dered decisive if the standard of wine was already on a par with the best from the rest of the world. It is not.
Reports that Chile is the new Australia are greatly exaggerated. Chile's great strength is supple, easy-going red wine, mostly made from cabernet sauvignon, which possesses all that grape's blackcur- rant fruitiness, and sometimes its tobacco spiciness, but apparently none of its hard, crabbed tannin. Chilean white wine is by a long chalk less interesting, though the occasional chardonnay or more especially sauvignon blanc (the one produced by Miguel Torres is remarkably Loire-like) reach the level of a decent French country wine.
The question with Chile, as with Bulgar- ia, is about value for money. Chilean cabernet at around £3 really is much more enjoyable, more sensuous, than anything Bordeaux can produce at that price. After tasting the rich, full Concha y Toro (Wait- rose and others, £3.25) or the lighter Campo dei Fiori (Oddbins, £2.69) caber- nets one might fear for the future of the producers of bordeaux superieur or minor medoc. But how much better do Chilean wines get as they go upmarket?
Well, there is the cedary elegance of Villa Carmen (Barnes Wine Shop, Grape Ideas, c.£5) or the very distinctive cigar- box character of Cousin° Macul Antiguas Reservas: lovely, seductive wines at their best, more than a match for many a cru bourgeois. But the high peaks of quality (no Chilean wine I have tasted approaches, say, Wynns Coonawarra Cabernet, which costs £6.99 from Victoria Wine) the Chi- leans do not scale.
This, I think, is the legacy of Hispanic culture. Spain, in all its vast acreage under vines, produces even now precious little of outstanding quality, but an enormous amount of excellent plonk. It is the same, Ortega and others have argued, with His- panic societies: corrupt, decadent and use- less at the top, richly alive at the bottom. Chilean plonk is even better than Spanish plonk, but it is still, for the most part, plonk. What is needed is not so much new wine-making equipment as a different kind of society. Before Pinochet, Chile had a long democratic tradition, which surely helped to make her the best wine producer in South America. When that absurd and disastrous man goes, things may look up again.
Harry Eyres
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