Day 30: Santiago, Chile

Today was wine tour day. We were picked up at our hotel around 9:30 this morning by our friendly guide Greta (not a man, luckily) in a small tour bus with 7 other people (mostly Brazilian). We were first taken to a horrendous factory/store selling lotion and other beauty products made from rose hips and grape seed (grapes being the very tangential relationship to a wine tour). We were told there would be a questionnaire at the end of the tour where we should indicate whether we felt this store should be included and we all voted a resounding "no".

After that annoying detour, we were taken to our first winery - Aquitania. It's a boutique winery in the Maipo Valley right at the base of the Andes mountains, which was a stunning setting. An interesting fact we learned today is that it is an old French tradition to plant roses at the end of each row (originally red for red wine grapes and white for white wine grapes) as an early warning system for a particular kind of disease that would affect the more sensitive roses first.




We were lucky enough to be there for the first day of the harvest. Here are some of the workers doing the first step of removing the large stems and leaves. When the bunches go into the machine at the top of the conveyor belt, all of the stems are removed.




After a tour that showed us the very artisanal process of winemaking used at this small winery, we were given a tasting of two of their wine varieties. We voted the tasting setting the best we've ever experienced at a winery because it was done out in the central garden, with us all sitting on benches all around it.




After a break for lunch, we spent the afternoon at the second winery - Concha y Toro - which is the largest wine exporter in all of Latin America according to our tour guide there. It was absolutely gorgeous. It used to be owned by the politician (whose last name was Concha y Toro) who started it as a hobby, but now it's a publicly traded company. The family used to live in the amazing 22-bedroom house on the property which has 20+ acres of park land that was landscaped in the English Victorian style.



We were taken on a tour that included both one of the state-of-the-art cellars and the oldest cellar, which is used only for their highest-end wine. The technology of the new cellar was impressive but the old cellar was absolutely amazing - it felt like a movie set. They don't use any temperature control and it is automatically always in a much smaller temperature range than the one that is technologically monitored.






The brand Casillero del Diablo is part of the Concha y Toro line and got its name (which translates to "the devil's locker") because Don Melchor (the original owner) heard that local workers were stealing some of his best bottles that he was saving, so he started a rumor that the devil lived in that cellar. Apparently it worked.

Here we are at the end of the tour at the last tasting.



Concha y Toro has a beautiful restaurant and wine bar on the property so we spent an hour there before the bus left. We shared a tasting of 3 of their premium wines, which were fantastic.

After a lengthy bus ride back into the city, we came back to the hotel and then went out for Indian food for dinner.

Tomorrow is our last day in Santiago and in South America!

ILM