Wine & Spirits - June 2018 - 20

"I started
appreciating those
less ambitious wines,
which were harvested
earlier and which
were much fresher
and easier to drink."
-Rodrigo Zamorano

WINE & SPIRITS

as we did with our first carmenère: That is, we harvested it early and we aged it in large foudres," he
says. The original carmenère , from 1996, was 12.5
percent alcohol. The latest release of Alto de Piedras,
from the warm 2015 season in Maipo, is barely a half
percent higher.
De Martino is not alone in this new direction.
There is, suddenly, a trend toward earlier harvests
and fresher red wines. As winegrowers focus in on
the right sites for carmenère, the variety is providing juice for some of the country's most exciting
new wines. Sebastián Labbé, at Santa Rita, is now
making two carmenères that present their origins
unadorned. When he took over as winemaker for the
Maipo-based winery in 2016, one of his first tasks was
to blend the 2014 Pehuén, Santa Rita's top carmenère . The former winemaker, Andrés Ilabaca, had
provided him with a number of components in barrels. Many of them were very ripe and voluptuous;
but there were others, harvested earlier, as an experiment, and they were fresher, with red fruit and some
pyrazines. Labbé emphasized those fresher components in the final blend and presented a radically
different style than Pehuén had offered in previous
vintages. "I liked the result so much that I decided
to make another carmenère," he tells me, "but this
time with one hundred percent fresher fruit." That
wine, the 2017 Floresta Carmenère, is one of his most
notable achievements so far (it's recommended in
this issue, though not currently available in the US
market).
Labbé buys the fruit for this wine from a vineyard
in Apalta, in Colchagua, where the Muñoz family has
been working for generations with vines that are now
70 years old. "It is unusual for an old vineyard like
this to have been planted on hillsides," Labbé says.
"Normally, vines were planted in the low, flat areas
where they could easily reach the water table. Plus,
the hillsides have less fertile soils, with mixtures of
clays, but also a lot of granite."
For Labbé, the key to growing good carmenère is
poor soils and limited water. "Our theory is that the

JUNE 2018

production of pyrazines stops when the vegetative
growth does. If there is a lot of water, this growth
never stops." In 2017, the challenge was not excess
water, but heat, as the harvest season was the warmest of the last decade. Labbé started tasting the grapes
in the first week of February and chose to harvest on
February 15, while the fruit was still focused on the
red side of the spectrum, producing a wine that held
some soft touches of green spice.
Labbé acknowledges that those green notes are
not universally loved, but he believes that the freshness and drinkability of the wine will win people over.
Rodrigo Zamorano, from the Caliterra winery,
says, "I lost my fear of pyrazines simply because I got
tired of avoiding them. And I also started appreciating those less ambitious wines, which were harvested
earlier and which were much fresher and easier to
drink." Zamorano also works with vines in Colchagua, in a horseshoe-shaped vineyard framed by hills.
In the lower sectors of the vineyard, where the
soils have more clay, Zamorano finds that carmenère produces round, ripe wines. He prefers the fruit
from higher parcels, where the soils are a mix of clay
and granite. "The wines are more angular," he says,
"sharper and more delineated."
Before Zamorano joined Caliterra in 2011, the
hillside vines were harvested very late. By tasting
the grapes and experimenting in the winery, Zamorano realized that the pyrazines those grapes initially
showed ended up fusing with the fruit flavors; and
even if he picked them earlier, the same thing happened. "For someone obsessed with pyrazines, tasting that fruit would have caused nightmares. But if
you have patience, you see how the flavors evolve
while the wine ages in wood, and how the pyrazines
meld with the fruit. The best thing is that you have
very good acidity-in a variety that supposedly has
very little." At least, that's what he'd been taught in
oenology school.
In 2016, Zamorano decided to vinify the fruit
from those hillside parcels and bottle it separately
as Pétreo, the newest wine in Caliterra's portfolio.
As the most recent harvest approached, Zamorano
invited me to share lunch at the highest point of Caliterra's Colchagua vineyard. He opened a bottle of
Pétreo 2016 to pour with several dishes prepared by
Señora Ana, Caliterra's cook. Among them was her
specialty, the torta de palta, a large cake assembled
from crepes layered with vegetables and covered
with thin slices of avocado, its green as intense as
the leaves on the carmenère vines. That vegetarian
dish might have seemed an unlikely companion for
carmenère-at least, for a richer, softer version of
the variety. But Pétreo shows off the fruity side of
carmenère, all its freshness accompanied by subtle
herbal notes. On a hot afternoon in Colchagua, the
wine's crunchy acidity makes it dangerously easy to
drink. n

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - June 2018