It happened in Napa Valley in the mid-1970's, when Napa Valley wines were just beginning to show their potential and capture the world's attention. It has happened in Argentina, in Australia, in Uraguay, in Roussilon, in Mendocino County, Tasmania, sheesh, it's happening in Southern England at this very moment.
Hey, I admire people who want to take a risk and get into the game early on. That's the spark, Their capital drives things forward in a very necessary way, and if the big investors guess right, they often win big. This sort of gold rush mentality attracts big money, just the way it attracted George Hearst to the 1849 California Gold Rush.
I find the Chilean wine industry fascinating on a couple of fronts. The notion that wine is an export product is front and center, and Chile generally embraces a free trade, export-friendly model of trade. I think this is one of the greatest accomplishements of the Chilean wine trade. They have succeeded in taking on Asia, even the Carribbean in a way that the U.S. Wine trade has largely failed.
The Pacific face of the Andes with the cool ocean currents presents a situation that is a bit like Northern California, but in a lot of places the land is more rugged. It's a part of the world that is almost ideally suited to growing top quality wine grapes, and I've tasted many superb wines from Chile, reds and whites, from the complex coastal and inland hillsides of central Chile.
In my humble opinion, the wines taste a bit more like what you might get from France compared to American wines in terms of their acidity, tannin, and body or fatness on the palate. One of the curious differences that makes them a little bit mor like California wines is that they often have more environmental flavors from the neighboring wilderness. Please read further if you are interested in that topic...
So, to me they aren't exactly new world wines, and not really old world wines either. Just as in Northern California, there is an exploration of cooler zones going on, and some brilliant wines emerging from those experiments. The wines taste as much like Old World wine as they do New World wines. Chile is completely intriguing in that regard. That's probably an entirely different discussion that warrants another post entirely.
Alexander Vik is a wheeler-dealer Norweigean buisinessman raised in Sweden and the Canary Islands, and was a golf champ during his tenure at Harvard. He has surfed a lot of economic bubbles, and made a mountain of money along the way. And he lost a lot of money for some frustrated creditors.
In the early 2000's Alexander Vik added to his hotel and wine empire, buying a massive property in Chile encompassing several small valleys and hillsides, built a hotel, and started clearing land and planting vineyards. The estate encompasses some 4,300 hectares (a hectare is about 2.5 acres), with about 300 of those planted to grapes. That's an impressive investment by any stretch, but a large portion of that was probably unplantable, steep wilderness. From the pictures I have seen, it was relatively wild when purchased, and has gradually been developed in a methodical, thoughtful way.
These VIK wines are pretty brilliant, and the top wine, VIK, may be the best blend that I have ever had from Chile. And I would credit the staff, including the winemaker Christian Vallejo for achieving this feat in Chile's central Colchagua Valley. (cont'd below)
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| VIK winemaker Christian Vallejo |
A Little More Background
Winemaker Christian Vallejo has been with this company almost from the beginning. A native Chilean, he also worked at Chateau Margaux in Bordeaux, and some other prestigious properties. Most of his professional life has been devoted to making excellent wines at this estate.
The Vik family bought the property in 2006, and Valleo was in on the ground level to help them plant the vineyards in 2007. They settled on a high-density 10,000 vines per hectare planting scheme that would assure that each vine would produce a low yield of around 1 kg of grapes, enough to produce about one bottle of wine per vine. This is a mantra ratio in the international fine wine industry right now.
This estate makes three wines. VIK is the flagship wine. It's a $100-plus Bordeaux blend (Cab, Merlot, Cab Franc, etc...) that is very much aimed at the international market. And it's really good and has a stylistic flair, sense of place, and refinement that some other high end wines from Chile have a hard time matching. It's really, REALLY good. It's subtle, refined, and just a little bit wild. that just a little bit wild part of things mostly comes from environmental influences, namely the oils from the indigenous plants that surround the vineyards on the adjacent hillsides. It is refined, balanced, and it has a great signature sense of place that makes it unique.
Milla Calla is the "second wine" the lower priced version of the headliner, a common Bordeaux strategy to introduce buyers to the estate at a lower cost. It's half the price and in many ways cut from the same cloth of the leading wine, it's just not quite as good as the top offering. And rich people always have to have the very best, even if it means an extra hundo or so. That's how you prove you're rich, so it all plays well for the upper crust, too.
Environmental Influences and Terroir
You taste that flavor in all of the wines from these vineyards. It's a common thread that runs through the VIK wines, and it's not dissimilar to the flavors that you see in mountain-grown Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley's Spring Mountain or Mount Veeder, except that the nuances are distinctly Chilean and reflective of the plants that grow on the hillsides there.
All of those local plants release aromatic oils that influence the ultimate flavors of the wines from that area. I think this is a really important subject that is not often discussed, but that very much applies to some of the world's great wines, including VIK.
These are the flavors that you get when you have a vineyard that is not surrounded by other vineyards, but by local forests. They change the flavor profile of the wines completely, and because the native plants vary from place to place, they are signature additions to the flavor profiles of the wines.
These subtle herbaceous flavors are what have made the wines of the Languedoc region of France so famous, becuase so many of those vineyards are planted on not only high-quality, rocky soils, but also next to forests.
In Bordeaux, this is not so much the case. Bordeaux vineyards, and Napa Valley valley floor vineyards for that matter, are pretty much surrounded by other vinyeyards, so they don't get that interesting environmental seasoning of essential oils from surrounding forests that makes some of the world's best wines great. Again, that probably warrants another post.
The Wines
Vik 2014 "La Piu Belle" Red ($80) This is a 'new world' style Cabernet-based blend that is more or less oriented toward new world critics like Robert Parker and the Wine Spectator. It's rich and ripe and not really reflective of the greater VIK goal. It seems like compromise in a lot of ways, but it's a very well made wine. There's a bit more Carmenere at play, it's riper and more generous with jammier dark fruit flavors. The label is really cool, it's a complicated wrap print that makes the bottle look ceramic and features the work of a ceramic painter that the family had bought a while back. Very cool packaging. (90 Points)
Vik 2014 "Milla Calle" Red ($50) It smells great - a mix of red currant, black cherry, mountain scrub, cola, with a little bit of vanilla and a hint of black olive. It finds a nice mix of fruity, bright notes and darker, earthier herb and earth notes. At the end of the day, it just comes across as super-drinkable and balanced, and genuinely complex. It's a lovely, elegant, dynamic wine. (92 Points)
Vik 2012 VIK Proprietary Red Blend ($120) I took some notes and ultimately wrote, "This is killer". It has lifted, bright red and black currant fruit aromas, toast, black olive, native scrub flavors, fine-grained tannins with just a bit of tarry bitterness, and great acid. This is the kind of acidity that you just don't get in super-ambitious expensive Cabernet-based wines, but here it is on full display. At the end of the day, this is a wine that wades into superstar waters and flat-out asks, "What do I have to offer that all of you do not," and delivers a completely different experience. That, to me, is special. The winemaking is impeccable, but the sense of place and unique fingerprint of this wine really stands apart. (97 Points)
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