The Best New Wines from Chile

I tasted through nearly a thousand wines for this year’s report, and while I was once again stunned by the quality-to-price ratio that Chile is capable of delivering at the low end, and impressed by a handful of world-class reds produced at the top, I found a troubling inconsistency of quality—not to mention value—in the vast middle range. Simply put, there are too many competently made but essentially generic and innocuous wines in the $15 to $30 range, which is a highly competitive segment of the market right now for any wine-producing country.

Chilean wine production is dominated by enormous wineries, many of which fall under multinational corporate umbrellas. Time and again, I found myself wondering if the stultifying culture of a bottom line- and marketing-driven corporate world has had a dampening effect on the willingness of Chile’s wine producers to wait a bit longer to harvest and to make wines without technological overkill. Absent risk-taking, wines may be correct but will rarely offer real character or individuality. There’s a lot to be said for consistency, but there’s also a case to be made for wines that exhibit site or at least regional character. On a tour of Chile’s most important wine-growing areas last year, I rarely felt the palpable energy that exists in regions where a small, eccentric producer’s influence can extend to the largest producers. It’s not as if most of Chile’s producers lack the resources. On the contrary: no region’s wineries can beat Chile’s for architectural grandeur, state-of-the-art machinery, expensive barrels, and fancy glassware, not to mention size. This is, after all, a country where wine exports are mostly counted in containers, not cases.