How Chilean Wine Saved The World
by Tony Perrottet
In today’s post we will day a trip south of Peru into Chile to tour the beautiful vineyards of this region.
International wine-lovers should raise a glass to Chile’s freakish geography: Thanks to the country’s isolation at the southwestern fringe of South America, its vineyards played an unexpected part in saving the wine industries of Europe. Production first began with the Spanish conquistadors, who planted the first vines from the pips of raisins they had carried in their pockets from Spain. The fertile valleys around Santiago proved ideal for agriculture, and soon immigrants from Germany and Switzerland, who felt at home in the gentle alpine climate, were bottling excellent vintages for local consumption. Then, in the 1880s, a visionary landowner named Don Silvester Ochagavía decided to improve the standard by traveling to Bordeaux in France and bringing back vine cuttings for Sauvignon Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc. It was a fortuitous move.
Not long afterwards, the vineyards of Europe were struck by a plague of the insidious phylloxera insect, which chews away at the roots of the parent stock. The invasion wiped out production in much of France, Italy and Germany. But Chilean vineyards were protected by nature: the central valleys of this spaghetti-like strip of land, 2,700 miles long but never more than 110 miles wide, are shielded from vermin and disease by the Pacific Ocean on the west, the towering Andes on the east, the world’s driest desert, the Atacama, in the north and the wilds of Patagonia to the south.
Soon it was the European producers who imported the untouched vines back from Chile, grafting them back onto their own stock and slowly recovering their footing. It was a close call for wine lovers, who might have lost some of their most beloved varietals. Today, Chile boasts many of the world’s oldest continually growing vines, some over a century old, which are now being hand-crafted into succulent wines that rival anything from France or Italy.
