New Releases from Chile: The Tail Wags the Dog

BY JOSH RAYNOLDS | FEBRUARY 28, 2017 

After years of percolating beneath the surface of an ocean of corporate, albeit frequently well-made wines, Chile’s small-scale winemakers are slowly but steadily rising to the consciousness of wine lovers. My recent tastings of a wide swath of Chile’s wines revealed more top-notch, artisanally produced bottlings than ever before, most of them from small independent wineries that are members of MOVI (Movimiento de Viñateros Independientes), whose first wines began showing up in export markets in 2010. And not to be outdone, the big boys are now crafting a growing number of more distinctive limited-production bottlings, often based on historically obscure (for Chile) but intriguing varieties like Carignan, Cinsault, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot—and even País, a.k.a. Mission, the oldest variety planted in the country.

Apalta Valley

Given the large, even massive scale of most of Chile’s wine production and the market dominance of its biggest players, small wineries have always had a very tough time reaching an audience, inside or outside their home country. The same issue, by the way, has plagued artisanal wineries in Australia, but more and more of these little guys have recently begun to find wide export audiences for their wines, and this has been to the benefit of the entire country’s wine industry. But Chile’s smaller wineries are still at least a few years behind Australia’s when it comes to receiving the recognition that they deserve, a situation that I attribute to the rigid focus on the bottom line practiced by the very large firms that make and import Chilean wines. Importers in particular rarely pay much attention to promoting wines unless they’re cheap and made in huge quantities, and this is an issue for most wine-producing areas, not just Chile. Indeed, the phrase “artisanal Chilean wine” probably strikes most industry folks and consumers as oxymoronic, such is the market dominance of mass-produced, low price-point, often anonymous bottlings.