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25 years, Chilean wines have gained a worldwide following. But back in the late 1980s, the situation was very different. Chile’s wine industry was in a backward state, and the few wines that it shipped were little more than curiosities. VER THE PAST
tread
AMIE ROSS was born in London and educated at Westminster School and King’s College London. After university he worked in Chile for the wine producer Viña San Pedro, where he met the founders-to-be of Viña Montes. He has been fascinated by Chile and its wines ever since. He now works in publishing, is married with three children and is the co-founder of his own small winery in Chile.
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In 1988, four Chilean wine professionals came together with a simple plan to break away from the mould: to capitalize on the country’s heaven-sent climate and winemaking potential and make the very best wines that Chile could offer. From modest beginnings it was a plan that has grown into one of the great modern-day wine success stories; one that has helped change the perception of Chile as a wineproducing country. The name of the venture is Montes, and in this third edition of Where Angels Tread author Jamie Ross brings its remarkable story up to date. A new icon wine, developments at Montes’ Kaiken operation in Argentina and its paradigm-shifting ‘dry farming’ of vineyards are some of the additions to the story of a winery that symbolizes Chile’s emergence to winemaking distinction.
‘If the Montes story reads like a dream it is because it started that way, and then progressively came true.’ Hugh Johnson ‘A top pick for any serious wine library.’ Midwest Book Review Gourmand World Cookbook Award Winner
jamie ross
Back cover: Montes’ Apalta estate, Colchagua Valley
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BY
JAMIE ROSS
FOREWORD BY HUGH JOHNSON
Viña Montes Chile
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WHERE ANGELS TREAD
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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FOREWORD
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TRIBUTES
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PROLOGUE
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FOUR MEN
AND AN
A FOOTPRINT WINES
AND
ON
IDEA
EARTH: THE VINEYARDS
WINERIES
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THE ANGEL SPREADS HER WINGS: MONTES’ INTERNATIONAL PRESENCE
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THE MONTES/KAIKEN TEAMS
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MONTES TIMELINE
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THE WINGSPAN
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IMPORTER TESTIMONIALS
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INDEX
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS HEN I WROTE the first edition of this book in 2005, little did I think that in ten years’ time I would be preparing a third edition. Montes had already achieved plenty enough in its vineyards and bodegas to make a full story, complete with big name wines and big name personalities. Founding partner Douglas Murray wanted to record for posterity the achievements of the founders, and without his support the book would never have happened. I now know that in the case of Montes, unlike investments, past performance is a reliable guide to the future. Montes has now reached its quartercentury. Aurelio and his son Aurelio Jr, with their teams, continue to explore and create, geographically and oenologically, in Chile and Argentina. The story of Montes goes on.
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I’d like to thank the following for their time and input during the research for the three editions of this book:
At Montes/Kaiken: Rodrigo Barría Alma Brown Jorge Gutierrez Sonia Montanares Aurelio Montes Aurelio Montes Jr Vanessa Moreno Dennis Murray Carlos Serrano Eduardo Stark Andrés Turner Eduardo Wexman Elsewhere: Eduardo Alemparte Marchese Piero Antinori Ana María Barahona Pierre Beuchet Sally Bishop Professor Edmundo Bordeau Nicolás Catena Amalia Cebreiro Oz Clarke Samuel Claro Greta Coghill
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Michael Cooper The late Michael Cox Aman Dhall Elizabeth Diaz Hubrecht Duijker John Duval Marnix Engels Mariano Fernández Corinne Fischer Peter Gago Matías Garcés Jorge García Alex Guarachi Rafael Guilisasti James Halliday Professor Emeritus Alejandro Hernández Danny Hewitt Yasuhisa Hirose Kitty Johnson Lucy Johnson Cathy Kitch Hi Sang Lee Gregory Li Ciro Lilla Michel Marentette
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Sanjay Menon Nicolás Parot Dmitry Pinski Jürg Reinger Clara Roby Christophe Salin David Sandys-Renton Michael Schachner Patrick Schmitt MW Ilia Schapiro Tom E. Smith
Margaret Snook Steven Spurrier Ralph Steadman Rob Temple Ch’ng Poh Tiong Rick Toller Miguel A. Torres John Turco Ignacio Williamson Clet Wong The late Martin Wright
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ALF A CENTURY of chronicling gives you a certain perspective. When I started observing the wine world it moved in slow motion. You could turn your back for a decade, it seemed, turn round again and see the same scene; the wines, and their producers, more mature, but the wine list, the vine rows and the cellars virtually unchanged. It showed signs of new energy in the 1970s when Australia and California first thought about exporting. By the ‘80s, wines from Eastern Europe and New Zealand showed on the radar. In the ‘90s, the pace quickened – and Chile made its bow as a reliable and bountiful source of good-value Cabernet.
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It was not a racing start. Politics were against it, and so were the traditions and tastes of the South American market. It took visionaries to demand more – above all from themselves. But 25 years has been long enough for a new industry to start, to focus, plant, build, to find markets and mature. Its founding generation, the visionaries, with only their own energy, their faith and their as yet largely unplanted land, are now its respected leaders. Their children are making the new waves. The firm of Montes, above all, is a historic example of the formula: vision + sweat = pleasure for millions. A strict mathematician would add good fortune to the ingredients. I would stress the sweat: it has taken the stupendous efforts of the founders and their colleagues to achieve, from a scratch, unfinanced start, the world standing that Montes now enjoys. If the Montes story reads like a dream it is because it started that way, and then progressively came true. Its progenitors, you feel, must deliberately avoid pinching themselves, for fear of waking up to a small business and walls not covered with trophies. This is the sober record of their success: dream first, then methods, gambles, stumbles, acceptance and realization – beyond anything its founders could ever have imagined. I first met the founders, Aurelio Montes and Douglas Murray, in phase one; dreamtime. They were working together at Viña San Pedro, and showed me round, an excursion recorded in a photograph in the book I was helping to research, Jan Read’s Chilean Wines. I had just made the discovery of Chile’s vinous treasure, then little known in Britain. It was my second visit; the first, in the 1970s, had showed me only what potential there must be, and what a lovely country Chile was. Now I was beginning to see that Chile’s grapes are as good as any on earth. Here is my tasting note on what must have been an early Aurelio Cabernet: ‘Attractive nose, sweet and resinous. A fairly big robust wine with good tannic thrust. Very well made, enjoyable and a good interpretation of Chilean style’. Measured rapture, you might say. How things have changed.
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Douglas was ebullient, engaged, intensely one-to-one: an instant friend. I suggested my nephew Jamie should take in Chilean wine as part of his broader education. He went, met the Montes pair and their finance director, Alfredo Vidaurre, and found himself their first representative in London. He went on into publishing and was the natural choice to tell the story. Even he must have been astonished as the details came out. How do you start what amounts to a Grand Cru (no, several Grands Crus) from scratch? How do you persuade people to take your wines seriously? How do you repeat the process round the world? What happens when everybody falls in love with your baby? Can you turn a few thousand bottles into a few hundred thousand, then a few million, without losing the essence? Jamie takes up the story again. First there is expansion beyond Chile, to a new winery in Argentina. I have always felt that Chile and Argentina, their wine capitals, Santiago and Mendoza, so close together, are complementary; natural partners. Mendoza adds its wonderful Malbec to the catalogue of possibilities, and its potential for brilliant sparkling wine. Then comes the leap to North America: a Montes venture in the Napa Valley. As a continuing theme there is the exploration of Chile itself. Thirty years of trial, and occasionally error, have revealed terroirs and microclimates that have amazed the world. In Chile, as in California, it is the Pacific that rules the climate. Venturing closer to the sea has given Chilean wine new dimensions of freshness and elegance – making sparkling wine, too, a reality. And there is always something more to aim at: recognition as one of the world’s truly important and original wineries. Montes’ new Cabernet cuvée, christened Taita – Wise father in the native tongue – is that crowning achievement. And that is not to mention the ever-expanding marketplace. Even a few years ago who would have imagined that Montes wines would be prized in China? Aurelio and Douglas engineered a company with a perfectionist pioneering philosophy and a strict working practice that has continually opened new avenues. Aurelio’s son, Aurelio Jr, now the company’s winemaker in Argentina, and Douglas’s son, Dennis, ensure the succession. Douglas has sadly gone, but in the full knowledge that the two original partners created a lasting force in the future of Chilean wine. A national champion.
Hugh Johnson
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TRIBUTES ‘ Chilean wines would not have achieved their reputation and their position worldwide without the vision and contribution of a great wine personality like Aurelio Montes, who is now “exporting” his skills and talent also to other wine countries such as Argentina and California.’ Marchese Piero Antinori Antinori, Italy
‘ Aurelio Montes is a passionate man who has dedicated his life to promoting the wines of Chile and its regions. He has shown that Chile can make excellent quality wines at every price point, including a Cabernet Sauvignon that can be aged. I especially enjoy drinking his Montes Alpha M Cabernet Sauvignon-based blend.’ Nicolás Catena Bodega Catena Zapata, Argentina
‘ To follow the progress of Montes has been to follow the progress of Chile as a modern wine nation. They are always at the fore of any move into new regions and they are always blazing the trail with new, ambitious flavours and styles. And for me, a traveller from distant Europe, they are the most charming hosts – generous with their time, generous with their knowledge – that you could possibly hope to meet.’ Oz Clarke British wine writer
‘ Montes reds are highly respected in New Zealand for their quality and irresistible value. The Cabernet Sauvignons, Merlots and Malbecs are impressively warm and deep flavoured, yet also vividly varietal, and the top Syrahs are of arresting quality. The cool-climate Sauvignon Blancs must also be giving Marlborough’s winemakers a few sleepless nights.’ Michael Cooper New Zealand wine writer
‘ I remember the beginnings of Discover Wine in 1988 – four visionary men with a dream that implied great risks and enormous challenges. Today, we see that dream transformed into Montes, producer of some of Chile’s top quality wines. A winery that is continuously innovating, discovering new terroirs and surprising us with new wine styles. Montes wines’ outstanding worldwide success is something we are all very proud of in Chile. I still have my bottle of Montes Alpha M 1996, which I received when it was released many years ago. It’s still in its wooden box, wrapped in green paper printed with the now famous Montes angel. Nearly twenty years seems a long time to have resisted the temptation to open the bottle, but it is not such a long time for the tremendous achievements of Montes and its three musketeers – Alfredo, Aurelio and Douglas. I will never forget the angels who have left us, two wonderful, wise and very dear friends. To Aurelio, my thanks for the opportunity to enjoy the wines and my best wishes for Montes, a winery that will always be close to my heart. Cheers!’ Elizabeth Diaz Manager of Vinos de Chile 11
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‘ Viña Montes is a combination of great vineyards, great cellars and great people … the result is great wines.’ Hubrecht Duijker Dutch wine writer
‘ From a brave entrepreneurial start in 1988, Viña Montes has forged a reputation for producing world-class wines from Chile. I was first introduced to the wines of Montes by Aurelio Montes in 1993, when visiting Hong Kong to judge an international wine competition. I was impressed by the wines, but also taken by the passion and enthusiasm Aurelio showed for his wines and for the future of the Chilean wine industry. Since then, I have been fortunate to meet Aurelio many times, both in Chile and in Australia. The strengths of Viña Montes are its pioneering spirit, vision and ability to innovate. I remember tasting a barrel sample of Syrah made from the first crop planted at the impressive Apalta vineyards, in Colchagua. Not only was the wine excellent, particularly from vines so young, but several years later, when I first visited the vineyard, I could see the vision and appreciated the gamble of planting Syrah on the spectacularly steep slopes. Several vintages later, Apalta has now cemented a reputation for producing excellent Syrah, as Montes Folly has shown. Quality wine can only be produced from quality vineyards, and the new vineyard developments at Marchigüe and Apalta will underwrite future growth of premium wines. The wines of Montes are now available worldwide. This is in no small way due to the tireless efforts of Aurelio Montes and Douglas Murray, who have travelled as ambassadors for their company but also for the wines of Chile.’ John Duval Former Penfolds Chief Winemaker, Australia
‘ As a fellow southern hemisphere producer, Penfolds is delighted to have witnessed the unabated successes of Viña Montes over the last 27 years. A Chilean champion of Syrah, via Montes Folly, certainly strikes an encouraging note here in South Australia. We respect the emphasis on quality – both in their exceptional vineyards in North and South America and across a formidable and diverse range of wines, culminating in the lauded flagship, Montes Alpha M. The entrepreneurial and visionary style of the founding partners has been well documented and recognized – true gentlemen in the world of wine! Following the first edition of this text, we continue to remember the profound contributions of the late Douglas Murray and Alfredo Vidaurre. Today we congratulate Aurelio for his Wine Enthusiast’s 2015 Innovator/Executive of the Year Award!’ Peter Gago Penfolds Chief Winemaker, Australia
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‘ My mind goes back to the early 1980s, when I first met Douglas Murray. He was in charge of exports at Viña San Pedro and I the same at Concha y Toro. He was an extremely hard worker and traveller, a real believer in the quality potential of Chilean wine. When he and his partners decided to get together on the Montes project, I knew they had all the tools to succeed. In particular, two fundamentals: first, they were a group who shared a dream, a vision that they were capable of producing high-quality wines and so break with the ethos that prevailed in the industry at the time. Second, each of them was more than talented – they were passionate. Vision and passion, these virtues are in my opinion the soul of Montes and the reason for its success. Life goes on and Douglas and Alfredo are now not with us. We can conjure up wonderful thoughts about their contribution to Montes and the Chilean wine industry, but I prefer to think of them as the fruit of two great vintages, and each of us will take pleasure in enjoying them on very particular occasions. In my case, every time I look to the future I will remember that fulfilling dreams is possible, that Douglas and Alfredo demonstrated how the future relies on hard work, love of what you do and, above all, how wine is worth it. What they did for the Chilean wine industry was not great, it was superb. For us, their colleagues, in fact our whole generation, it is simply part of our lives. They will be with us forever. Douglas and Alfredo, “Salud!”, and long live your angels.’ Rafael Guilisasti Vice-Chairman of Viña Concha y Toro, Chile Former President of Viñas de Chile
‘ Montes Folly Syrah is of great importance for both Montes and the broader Chilean wine industry. It successfully shows that Chile is not simply reliant on a limited range of clean varietal wines produced under favourable (that is, easy) growing conditions and selling on world markets at highly competitive prices, but is capable of taking significant steps upwards. Hillside vineyards are expensive to establish and maintain in any part of the world, and the relative gap between the cost of river plain and hillside grapes in Chile is far greater than elsewhere. Nonetheless, the quality of the initial releases of Montes Folly Syrah makes one very confident about the future. The wines, after all, have been made from very young vines, and the quality of the grapes can only improve as the vines age. That the winery skills are there is beyond doubt; the Folly wines are very well crafted.’ James Halliday Australian wine writer and winemaker
‘ When you have been closely linked to the development, teaching, production and selling of wines for 50 years, it is easy to see who has opened avenues for others to follow, who has inspired others. In the development of Chilean wine, Montes is clearly the success story. How does a Chilean winery achieve so much in quality terms and receive so much international recognition in a relatively short time? Because of the people behind it, whom I have known for more than 30 years. Very few have followed their careers as closely as I have. Each of the four founders is incredibly gifted in a specific field and together they have been able to reach so much further than they ever imagined.’ Professor Emeritus Alejandro Hernández Dean of the School of Oenology at the Catholic University of Chile Former President of the Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin (OIV)
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‘ When I went to Chile in 1988 for the first time, to study our investment in Los Vascos, I realized that among the large and historic wine companies there was a new venture called Discover Wine, run by two interesting characters, Aurelio Montes and Douglas Murray, who were travelling the world (as much as I was doing) explaining what Chile was about. I finally met them in the early 1990s at a dinner in Singapore where, in the presence of the Chilean Ambassador, they were explaining Chile like nobody else could. Since then I have developed a tremendous respect for Aurelio, as leader of the new Chilean wine industry. We share the same long-term philosophy. He certainly knows how to make wines, talk about them, sell them ... and how to drink them with good friends, toasting Douglas’s memory.’ Christophe Salin Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite), France
‘ Chile should be extremely grateful that Aurelio Montes decided to try winemaking when studying agronomy at the Catholic University in Santiago. That’s because, without him, the country would not have one of its most prominent and pioneering personalities, or the name behind one of South America’s most globally recognized wine brands. Among Aurelio’s many trailblazing moves must be his work with Syrah, his use of Ralph Steadman for wine labels and feng shui for winery design. More recently, he’s tackled Chile’s increasing water shortage head-on: he’s turned off the irrigation at his prized Colchagua vineyards – and the vines have survived. But he’s not stopping there; now he’s trying the same risky approach to viticulture in Argentina, where he has the Kaiken brand. Meanwhile, he’s working on building the reputation of an entirely new Chilean region – Zapallar, just seven kilometres from the ocean in the Aconcagua Valley. As for his latest plan, that’s to make a world-class Riesling from Chile. And because it’s Aurelio, we can expect to see him succeed, and quickly.’ Patrick Schmitt MW Editor-in-Chief of The Drinks Business, UK
‘ Viña Montes continues to set the bar very high for quality-driven, site-specific winegrowing in Chile. The visionary work undertaken there by founding partners Aurelio Montes and the late Douglas Murray quickly established a gold standard for the country’s wines. Since 1988, their uncompromising winemaking model has yielded impeccably crafted, formidable blends and single varietals that never fail to impress. Indeed, the reds are frequently the top-scorers in their class, establishing a track record that firmly places the Montes name in the wine world’s top echelon of producers. Kaiken, Montes’ ultra-Malbec Argentinian brand, and Napa Angel, its California Cabernet-centric outpost, are similarly attaining lofty heights.’ Tom E. Smith Editor and Publisher of Wine News, USA
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‘ The complementary characters behind Montes have created, in less than two decades, a wine company that has become one of the top five in Chile and one of the leading exporters of estate-produced wine. The Montes logo is an angel – indeed it was the Montes Angel, a miniature statuette of which Douglas Murray had given me, that helped me find my lost pair of reading glasses one Vinexpo. And after capturing the super-premium market with their brand Montes Alpha, the only wine to receive five stars in a recent Cabernet tasting at Decanter magazine, the partners have now released a new wine named, appropriately, Purple Angel. Made from the Carmenère grape, imported from Bordeaux in the mid-1800s and now unique to Chile, and a little Petit Verdot from vines high up on the hillsides of their Finca de Apalta vineyard in the Colchagua Valley, it continues the vision of the four founding partners to produce truly great, truly Chilean wine. Their country is right to be proud of them.’ Steven Spurrier British wine writer and Consultant Editor of Decanter magazine
‘ All great wines, by definition, are capable of ageing and, in the ageing, of evolving into something more complex and sophisticated than the exuberance of their original youth. All great wines are also capable of travelling or more specifically, of staying undeterred and undiminished by the travel. Montes is one such effortless traveller. But a bottle of wine, no matter how fine or great, needs someone to launch it on its odyssey. Montes is infinitely fortunate to have had in Douglas Murray such an able pilot who had tirelessly stewarded the wine into the waiting glasses of wine lovers across the four corners of the world. I have not altered my original testimonial above from the first edition, except for marking Douglas’s contribution into the past tense, now that he has left us. Even that is not entirely accurate because Douglas Murray has not left us at all, since his memory still dwells in our heart. Also, his contribution to Chile is as stubborn a gift to that country’s wine industry as Douglas was caring, considerate and charming. The fact that as soon as we recall his name a smile breaks out on our face is testament to how much Douglas Murray’s life has enriched ours, and the wines of Montes and Chile.’ Ch’ng Poh Tiong Publisher of the Singapore Wine Review
‘ I am always pleased to remember the Montes partners, especially Pedro Grand, from the early 1980s. It is admirable how Montes has developed in only a few years. They selected great varietals from the best Curicó vineyards and have produced excellent wines, guided by Aurelio Montes’ oenological know-how. Plus the extraordinary sales and marketing effort of Douglas Murray, who left us last year. Their record and success is there for all to see. It also represents success for Curicó Valley.’ Miguel A. Torres, Spain
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PROLOGUE
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‘
T’S THE END
I
of the line,’ said a fellow passenger referring to the acres of empty seats surrounding us, as the 747 prepared to touch down for a bumpy night landing. That was 1987, when I first visited Chile, then a disconcertingly unvisited country under an authoritarian regime. Isolated by distance and politics, it was worlds away from the progressive, successful nation that has since emerged and become discovered. One obvious measure of Chile’s progress is its wines, ubiquitous now but virtually unknown in the 1980s, when they were little more than curiosities, sometimes showing flashes of brilliance, from a distant land. The purpose of that visit nearly 30 years ago was to learn about those wines, as the guest and trainee of wine marketeer Douglas Murray. With a true patriot’s heart and unfailing enthusiasm Douglas was already broadcasting the potential of his country’s wines, priming markets that were not yet ready to embrace what Chile had to offer. Amid the indifferent offerings of most producers, Douglas’s winemaker friend and colleague Aurelio Montes was making wines whose quality was opening up small chinks of international recognition. His newly bottled Cabernet Sauvignon, aged in then unheardof imported French oak barriques, seemed to me to pull off an impressive sleight of winemaking hand. It showed the qualities both of youth and of maturity: structured, ripe and plump, yet soft in tannins and with a depth of flavours associated with older wine. Douglas and Aurelio embodied real ambition and winemaking potential. Together, they were on the cusp of turning a simple idea into a venture that, in a matter of years, was to help change the perception of Chile as a wine-producing country.
HISTORY The story of Montes is but a small yet significant chapter in the long history of winemaking in Chile, whose distant beginnings are entwined with the very founding of the country. Although relatively new to today’s wine drinkers, Chile’s winemaking goes back 450 years, making it one of the oldest of the ‘New World’ wine-producing countries. South America, although a continent swarming in biodiversity, has no native vines of its own. The first to grow in Chilean soil arrived in the baggage trains of the Spanish conquistadors, who arrived across the deserts in the north of the country. Vines were a required travel accessory for the colonizing invaders. Everywhere they settled, the conquerors planted European Vitis vinifera, ostensibly for the Eucharist, but with pleasures of the dining table no doubt also in mind. No sooner had the breast-plated conquistador Pedro de Valdivia driven the imperial flag of Spain into the small hill that he named Santa Lucia, thus founding Santiago on the 12th of February 1541, than vines were planted in and around the remote new settlement. Wine has been part of the Chilean way of life ever since. The varietal mix from which colonialists made wine bears little resemblance to the international grape varieties now grown in Chile. The conquistadors brought with them the rustic País grape (known elsewhere as the Mission), which generally makes thin, acidic wine. It is still grown in not insignificant quantities in Chile for cheap, local production, and some winemakers have recently been reassessing its ability to
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A tree trunk constitutes probably the oldest winemaking artefact in Chile: the wine press located in the oasis town of Matilla on the desert route of the conquistadors. Dating from the early 1700s, it produced its last vintage in 1939. The earthen jars, or tinajas, are similar to those still used in parts of Spain
make quality wine. Other varieties grown in colonial Chile included the Moscatel de Alejandria, Moscatel Rosada (both still cultivated) and grapes with names redolent of the past, such as Aceituno and Huasco, now long extinct. After nearly three centuries of isolation under Spanish colonial rule, Chile fought its way to independence in 1818. The new republic opened up to trade and cultural links. Chile’s aristocratic and mercantile elite, rich on the profits of mining and land, travelled to Europe on the Grand Tour and brought back contemporary fashions and tastes. Upper-class gentlemen began to wear the English frock coat, while ladies adopted the latest fashions from the salons of Paris. Afternoon tea-drinking became fashionable and so too did the enjoyment of imported French wines, particularly those from Bordeaux. Such cargo incurred high duties and it was only a matter of time before Chileans were asking why they themselves could not make wine as good as the claret they were shipping. Chilean wine went through a rebirth in 1851 when the idea for change was taken up by enterprising landowner Don Silvestre Ochagavia, who introduced new varietal colour and winemaking methods to the country. From Bordeaux he personally transported cuttings of the vines that are familiar in Chile today: Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc and SÊmillon (plus some Riesling from Germany). He hired expertise in the shape of a French winemaker and so set in motion the
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beginnings of the modern Chilean wine industry. Ochagavia began a fashion that was followed by some of Chile’s wealthiest families of the day, who set up wine businesses in the 1850s and 60s. Attracted by the prestige of ownership of the equivalent of a Bordeaux château, they employed French knowledge and skills in planning and planting vineyards, designing wine buildings and making wine. Well into the 1980s, a significant number of these firms were still the prominent producers in Chile, and still in the hands of descendants of the founders. The timing of Chile’s adoption of predominantly French vines was to prove propitious, for within a few years the vineyards of Europe fell prey to the parasitical insect phylloxera. This root-eating, vine-killing microscopic louse originated in the USA, and from 1863 to 1875 all the wine-producing countries of Europe became infected with it, with catastrophic consequences. A cure was eventually found that involved grafting vines onto the roots of phylloxera-resistant North American vine species. In the late 1870s, upon hearing of the disease’s arrival in neighbouring Argentina, the government of Chile wisely banned the importation of vines. The belief held by most is that phylloxera has never managed to surmount Chile’s formidable natural barriers of mountain (the Andes), desert (the Atacama), ice (Antarctica) and ocean (the Pacific). A minority, however, believe that phylloxera has in fact made it into Chile, but that it has been thwarted by environmental conditions not to its liking. With multi-million-dollar wine and table-grape industries at stake, Chile takes no chances. Zero-tolerance rules ban the entry from outside of any form of vegetal matter without lengthy quarantine. The last decades of the nineteenth century were boom years for Chilean producers. While Europeans languished in the wake of phylloxera, Chile’s prephylloxera vines partly filled the supply gap and her wine industry flourished. Phylloxera refugees, particularly from Bordeaux, came with more technical expertise. Plantings grew, exports to Europe began in the 1870s, and medals at international exhibitions followed. But the early success of Chile’s new wine industry was to be short lived. For most of the twentieth century, only the odd Chilean wine could be found in the dusty corners of the world’s wine stores. So what happened to them for the best part of 85 years, until the likes of Montes appeared on the scene? Several factors contributed to the prolonged fading of Chile’s star, which burnt bright as the nineteenth century came to a close. Europe recovered from the devastation wrought by phylloxera and the competition returned. From 1902 onwards, wine was taxed persistently and punitively by successive Chilean administrations. Then to cap it all, in 1938 a Prohibitionist ban on virtually all new vine plantings was slapped on all producers in response to dangerously high levels of wine and pisco brandy consumption. By the 1940s, Chile’s wine production had come to a virtual standstill. Furthermore, during World War II the Chilean government banned all foreign goods. In the absence of Chile’s own manufacturing capacity, new winemaking equipment did not appear again until the 1960s, when import restrictions were lifted. With that came new viticultural techniques aimed at high-volume production, such as
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the parronal pergola training system from Argentina, which replaced traditional Bordeaux-style low-trained vines, but with negative consequences for quality. Worse was to come. Long-debated agrarian reform programmes began in the 1960s that broke up the latifundios, Chile’s near-feudal estates (some of which dated back to conquistador Pedro de Valdivia’s times). These changes were accelerated and radicalized, sometimes violently, under the Marxist regime of Salvador Allende. The result was the loss of vast areas of vineyard, social upheaval and economic chaos – hardly favourable conditions for winemakers. The consequent military regime of General Pinochet, which seized power in 1973, made Chile an outcast state in the eyes of the rest of the world, and the country’s isolation lasted for more than a decade. In 1974, the ban on vine plantings was lifted, but this was of little benefit in a climate of political and economic difficulties, declining domestic wine consumption and nonexistent exports. Many grape growers and producers were forced to uproot their vines or graft more profitable table-grape vines onto existing roots. It is hardly surprising therefore that when Chile emerged from isolation in 1989 after the Pinochet era, when the Montes story begins, its winemaking practices and habits were caught in a time warp. A free-market, export-orientated economy may have evolved, but winemaking equipment and habits had generally not. Yields from floodirrigated parronal-trained vines were high. In the absence of imported oak, producers had resorted to Chilean beechwood, rauli, for cooperage, which did few favours for wine. White wines tended to be oxidized and stale, while reds were overstewed and tainted by unclean barrels. The big producers who dominated Chile’s wine industry were making everyday wines on a large scale for an undemanding domestic market. There was a rudimentary appellation system to speak of, but in effect producers could source wines from wherever they wanted and when it came to labelling, scant respect was paid to the integrity of each vintage. The appearance of Montes was one of the first signs of an ambition to break away from the somewhat unadventurous, home-orientated ethos. This ambition would harness Chile’s great natural potential for producing top-quality wines; not for local pleasure, but to capture the interest of wine drinkers in distant markets.
GEOGRAPHY
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Chile is the result of a colossal geological accident that took place some 60 million years ago. Two of the Earth’s tectonic plates collided, throwing up the Andes mountain chain and a narrow, littoral strip of land between it and the Pacific Ocean, 4,270 kilometres of which is now Chile. The plates grind against each other still, generating frequent low-level seismic murmur. Occasionally and unpredictably the plates slip and the Earth shudders, producing fearful earthquakes. In September 2015, one million people had to be evacuated from around the northern port of Coquimbo after an 8.3-strength terremoto struck. Memories were still fresh of the even worse one of February 2010 that registered 8.8 on the scale, which made it as strong as the world’s worst ever: Chile’s 9.5 quake that
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flattened half of the southern city of Valdivia in 1960. The 2010 earthquake was so strong that parts of the country shifted by as much as eight metres. Land had to be remeasured and maps redrawn at a cost to the government of US$25 million. Although vineyards did not escape being shaken, grape bunches in February were light enough to hang on to their vines. Winery buildings on the other hand, including Montes’, suffered severe damage; countless barrels ruptured and 400 million litres of wine were lost.
Chile’s picture postcard diversity: the Atacama desert (above) and fertile Central Valley (right)
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Earthquakes are one aspect of Chile’s great natural diversity that makes the country a complete geography syllabus in one. Its deserts, altiplano, prehistoric forests, lakes, volcanoes, fjords, glaciers, ice floes and pampas are terrains so diverse and distant that they almost defy a sense of collective nationhood. In the middle of all this, by default, is a Mediterranean-type climate with conditions for growing vines that are considered some of the best in the world.
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Patagonian icebergs and the southern lake district
The shape of Chile’s landscape in the central region is straightforward. Running north-south between the cordillera of the Andes and the coast lies the Central Valley. This fertile land of alluvial and glacial deposits and varied soils has been shaken dead-flat by Chile’s constant seismic activity. Between the Central Valley and the sea runs a parallel broken chain of coastal hills, the Cordillera de la Costa, never more than 650 metres high and geologically much older than the Andes. Crossing the Central Valley and running to the coast is a series of east-west valleys, fed by short and fast-flowing rivers that form the basis of Chile’s wine regions. In response to pressure from the European Union, a new wine law was enacted in 1995 that tightened up Chile’s denomination of origin rules, putting in place a system of regions and sub-regions. It stipulates that at least 85 per cent of a wine must come from a region or sub-region if stated on the label, and that if a single grape is named, at least 85 per cent of the wine comes from that grape. Grape varieties are prescribed but production methods are generally not, and in recent years the range of varieties planted and new areas planted has grown significantly. Broadly speaking, Chile’s wine regions are the wide east-west valleys that run from the Andes to the Pacific – geographical vertebrae of Chile’s spine. They do not reflect any intrinsic differences in terroir and their former climatic characterization based on northsouth position has recently been overlaid by a more refined appreciation, and lately official recognition, of east-west climatic differences within each valley. Recent legislation has classified coastal, central plain and mountain areas by region, permitting producers to include ‘Costa’, ‘Entre Cordillera’, and ‘Andes’ on their labels. These variations in climate are caused by the two overwhelming factors that dictate Chile’s meteorology: the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean’s Humboldt current.
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The Andes, whose ever-present heights rise up from the valley floor, act as a giant airconditioning system from which cold air falls year-round, so that day-night temperature fluctuations are wide. The Humboldt current is a great mass-flow of chilled Antarctic water that curls up the whole length of Chile before veering westwards into the Pacific Ocean (making summer coastal bathing a bracing experience). The cool waters of the Humboldt exert a strong influence on the climate in central and northern Chile, cooling the coastal areas with sea breezes and giving rise to the rain-free summers and bright, clear skies of intense luminosity. All these factors combined do good and useful things to vines, encouraging them to produce healthy, ripe and physiologically balanced fruit: grapes ideal for winemaking. Chile is a small country in an immense landscape. Once described as ‘the worstlocated and worst-shaped country on the planet’, until fairly recently the sum of what the world at large knew about Chile was its peculiar geography (and its politics). Known for being the long thin country at the bottom of the world, that was where it stopped. If one asks what defines Chilean wines, the quip in reply is that wine, thanks to the endeavours of wine producers such as Montes, is increasingly defining Chile. Thinking wider, the great natural wonders of South America define the earthly power of the continent: the Amazon rainforest, the Andes mountains, the Atacama desert, the pampas, and at the very edge of the world, the fabled wilderness of Patagonia. Here are forces of nature in the shadows of which man’s endeavours assume a humility that gives rise to belief in powers beyond the human; to magic and to angels.
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I
N WINE CIRCLES,
Viña Montes has historically been almost as well known for its quadrilateral of four original founding partners, as it is for its line-up of awardwinning wines. The personalities behind one of the country’s recent and innovative wine success stories were almost household names in Chile, so regularly did they appear in newspaper columns and glossy magazines. Scores of new producers have appeared on Chile’s wine landscape in the past 25 years. Many of these are wine houses derived from pre-existing industry operators: grape growers or bulk wine producers turned bottlers, or high-profile joint ventures between old firms and big-name foreign wine investors. Montes stands out because it was at the forefront of the first wave of Chilean wine producers to make fine, ‘premium-quality’ wines. It also stands out because it began from virtually nothing. There was no big money behind it, there were no premises, and each of the founding partners had to continue in other lines of work to make ends meet for a number of years while the fledgling business got going. Although other shareholders have joined the Montes board since the business started, the identity of Montes has been defined less by a corporate personality and more by the remarkably productive collaboration of the founders. Montes is the product of the skills and knowledge – the intellectual capital – and the sheer commitment of its founders, and very little else.
Previous page: the Apalta winery 28
Montes’ founding partners, from left to right: Pedro Grand, Aurelio Montes, Douglas Murray and Alfredo Vidaurre
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If you had asked the founding partners what it was in their four-sided relationship that led to the success of Montes, they might have agreed that it was thanks to the very lack of consensus in the boardroom. They were one winemaker, one marketeer, one financial brain and one viticultural engineer, each respecting the others’ expertise by not interfering in decision-making outside his sphere. As Aurelio puts it, ‘If the founding partners had been four winemakers, it would have been a complete disaster.’ So who were the founders and what brought them together?
AURELIO Aurelio Montes has always been interested in reaching high. As a schoolboy at elite Saint George’s College in Santiago, he showed an early inclination towards altitude by representing his country in the pole vault and he loves to ski on the high pistes of the Andes. Described by Britain’s Decanter magazine as one of ‘the patriarchs of the Chilean wine industry’ and ‘industry leader’ by the Wine Spectator in the USA, by any measure Aurelio has reached and remains at the peak of his profession. He has served as Vice-President of Wines of Chile, the industry’s promotional body, and for his visionary contributions to Chilean wine is the recipient of several Lifetime Achievement Awards from august institutions. And flying high, he takes to the skies in his helicopter as a qualified pilot, commuting by air to the various Montes estates 200 kilometres south of Santiago. His aviator’s-eye view of the terrain offers him an advantage over other winemakers in the search for new vineyard sites. ‘I love to fly alone and think about the landscape,’ he says. ‘The particular slope of a beautiful coastal valley will catch my eye as protection from the winds.’
Looking the part: Aurelio is a winemaker known for his sharp business sense. In 2008, he was chosen as Chile’s Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young and El Mercurio, Chile’s national daily. Then in 2015, he won Wine Enthusiast magazine’s Star Award for Innovator/Executive of the Year
promising-looking for vines, with
Since his youth, Aurelio has been spurred on by the romanticism of swashbuckling endeavour; by those who have achieved firsts. As a keen sailor and reservist officer in the Chilean navy, he is inspired by Ferdinand Magellan, the man whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe (and rounding Cape Horn, the first European to set eyes on Chilean territory), and as an aviator, by the pioneering Wright brothers. He also has home-grown heroes. His maternal grandfather, Wilfred Baseden, was an English engineer who came to the north of Chile in the 1890s. Wilfred’s brother, Clifford, was a World War I British Royal Air Force pilot. He was shot down while on a mission over France’s Loire Valley, but he had the great fortune of falling directly into the gardens of
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Aurelio and his wife Bernardita on the rim of Rano Kau, the enormous volcanic crater lake on Easter Island, Chile’s Pacific Ocean territory
the Château of Cheverny, subsequently marrying the owner’s daughter, who had nursed him back to health. One of Aurelio’s Anglo-French cousins, Yvonne Baseden, was a British wartime Special Operations Executive, who, aged 22, was air-dropped alone into enemy-occupied France and undertook perilous undercover work helping the French Resistance, for which she was awarded the British MBE and the French Croix de Guerre. Another relation is Patrick Baseden, an exact contemporary of Aurelio and also an oenologist, former Deputy Managing Director of Veuve Clicquot champagne and now owner of Château la Bienfaisance in Saint-Émilion, with whom Aurelio has made a wine called Sanctus, in so doing becoming the first to apply some Chilean know-how to winemaking in Bordeaux. After arranging a research interview with Aurelio at the London Wine Fair, for the first edition of this book, I received a call from his office saying that Aurelio was unable to come after all. He had to remain in Chile to receive another award and this time it was a big one; not for winemaking, but in the broader category of agriculture. In a country whose economy in its middle latitudes is predominantly agrarian, Chile rewards its successes in this field. The Salvador Izquierdo award is bestowed by the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura, Chile’s oldest and most respected professional association, for entrepreneurship in agriculture, and Aurelio was the first winemaker ever to win this
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‘ Aurelio is such a well-rounded person; he’s a great oenologist, a great winemaker, and he always plays hard, whether it’s golf, tennis, skiing or polo.’ Alfredo on Aurelio
prize. Although it is not a wine prize, Aurelio counts it as one of his highest accolades yet, an attitude stemming from his feel for land and the importance of agriculture to his country; one that goes back to his oenological education. Aurelio’s father worked in insurance and had no greater or lesser interest in wine than any other middle-class Chilean family. On Sundays, he would open a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, his favourite being from the old family firm of Viña Undurraga, to accompany the traditional Chilean dish of empanadas, or pasties. The family had a small house in the country at a place called El Monte, where summer holidays were spent riding, fishing and trekking. Although Aurelio grew up in the city, it was his love of the countryside that decided for him his choice of study at university: agronomy, the science of soils and crops. Chile’s education of its winemakers is unusually thorough. Students have to cover agronomy in general before advancing to oenology, the study of winemaking. As a measure of the success of Chile’s wine industry, today oenology is the most popular of all the agricultural sciences at the leading Catholic University. Of all the science disciplines, it is the only one where student numbers now have to be limited. But when Aurelio was an undergraduate in the late 1960s, oenology was an academic backwater, training winemakers in the methods of making wine destined for the basic garrafa or carafe wine market. ‘I chose agronomy because I loved the countryside. I was not setting out to be a winemaker,’ says Aurelio. ‘But I was looking for an alternative within agronomy, got good results in oenology, and plumped for it. But the teaching was very technical, with very little emphasis on style,’ he remembers. ‘There just wasn’t the level of discussion and debate about wine that you find among students these days.’ While his contemporaries were drinking rum-and-Coke, Aurelio was hooked on Cabernet. Aurelio got an early and lucky chance to break away from the technocrat mould. His father must have been pleased when Aurelio was offered the job of winemaker at The mounted winemaker
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Undurraga, which he started the day after leaving ‘ What I admire in Aurelio is his talent to university. Undurraga was one of only a handful of make wine and his intuition. He has Chilean producers then aiming at better-thansucceeded twice now: at Apalta – an old average wines for the export market. It was a pear plantation, and at Marchigüe – which relatively small, family-run business and under the originally looked like the Serengeti. He and then Chairman, Alfonso Undurraga, Aurelio had I have supported each other; carte blanche to experiment. It is telling that Aurelio was the first full-time winemaker ever to complementary in that sense, needing each be employed by the firm. ‘Before that, an elderly, other.’ part-time winemaker visited once a week and Douglas on Aurelio preached his never-varying recipe like a cardinal,’ says Aurelio. Undurraga was Aurelio’s graduate school, where he could experiment with new techniques and styles and develop his own thesis on wine. ‘They needed improvement to achieve export targets and I must have spoilt literally thousands of litres of wine during the process. But I learnt from my mistakes.’ Undurraga was a producer that had significantly larger plantings of Riesling than other Chilean firms, the original stocks of which had been personally brought over from Germany by the company’s founder in the nineteenth century. Aurelio was exposed to risk-taking and the progress that derives from it. ‘Now that was scary,’ he says, recalling the strategy of trialling an entire Riesling harvest with a previously unknown method of oxidizing the wine pre-fermentation, which Alfonso Undurraga had despatched him to Germany to learn about. Undurraga was Aurelio’s opportunity to leave a still-isolated Chile to travel and learn from other wine-producing regions of the world, a chance that only a handful of other Chilean winemakers of his generation had. He became a great experimenter and during this time investigated new cooling devices and other winemaking gadgets. He was among the first in Chile to experiment with strains of artificial yeast, rather than relying on the vineyard’s natural yeast populations, so giving more control over fermentation. After 12 years at Undurraga, Aurelio suspected that unless he actually married an Undurraga his advancement in the firm would go no further. And he was ambitious. Alfredo Vidaurre was running Viña San Pedro, the second largest of the then ‘big four’ Chilean wineries (the other three were Viña Concha y Toro, Viña Santa Rita and Viña Santa Carolina). With 1,000 hectares of vineyards near Curicó, Chile’s south-central winemaking heartland, four large processing plants and a sizeable chunk of the popular, domestic wine market, it was winemaking on an industrial scale and very different to the cosy world of Undurraga. Although daunted at the prospect, Aurelio accepted the post of Production Manager, and it was there that he met Douglas Murray.
DOUGLAS Many valuable commodities have come out of the Atacama desert and Douglas Murray was one of them. From the bone-dry shimmering wastes of what they call Chile’s northern soul came minerals that created the country’s wealthy mercantile class in the nineteenth century. Today, copper is the mainstay of the Chilean economy, mined so heavily that extraction rates of its gargantuan open-pit mines directly influence prices on the world’s metal markets. The driest desert on Earth produced the wealth of Chile’s
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mining barons, many of whom became the founding fathers of an industry now producing Chile’s greatest liquid assets, her wines. And in Douglas Murray, Montes’ trailblazing export director, the desert produced another wine catalyst. Douglas’s key role in the history of Montes and his dedication to promoting the cause of Chilean wine over 35 years earned the respect of all who met him. Having held several senior positions in the wine trade, he was a leading personality in Chilean wine, known for his pioneering export spirit. His charm, openness and self-deprecating manner won him many friends worldwide. But early in 2009, he was diagnosed with advanced oesophageal cancer and after a long struggle he lost the battle against the illness in June 2010. For his wife Lucy and three children, Douglas Jr, Pamela and Dennis, his loss was all the more tragic because it came at a time when Douglas, at the age of 67, could have finally travelled less; settled down; been at home. He was denied the retirement that he so deserved, in which to enjoy his extending family and the Gaudíinspired house and garden that he had lovingly designed and built. For his colleagues at Montes, Douglas’s loss was also like losing a family member, a paternalistic mentor whose personality was part of the Montes brand. His passionate belief in the values that had driven Montes to success, and concern that they should be honoured, was summed up in his self-styled job title: ‘Guardian of the Spirit’ (a mantle now adopted by Aurelio). Such was the esteem and affection in which he was held by the Chilean wine industry that after his death, Chile’s wine journal the Diario del Vino declared ‘Chilean viticulture is in mourning’. In recognition of Douglas’s work, the government’s trade promotion body, ProChile, honoured Douglas with a posthumous award. But if you had stood in Douglas Murray’s office you might have been forgiven for thinking that his trade was ethnic art, not wine. ‘There’s no more space at home and I haven’t told Lucy about all these yet …’ he once said coyly, referring to the room’s contents. It appeared that this champion of Chilean wine exporting had been redressing the trade balance with some private importing of his own. Amid piles of wine The Atacama desert: driest on Earth and Douglas’s spiritual home
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books and Montes paraphernalia, wide-eyed wooden visages and painted totems stared at you from all sides. Douglas’s legacy is a collection of priceless ethnic art that must be unique in Chile, one that has turned his house into a small museum. Half-elephant, halfman Ganesha idols from India decorated Montes’ smart offices in Huechuraba, one of Santiago’s shining new office developments. ‘My Indian friends tell me it is the only 100 per cent good god, the others being ambivalent. Ganesha is the god of students and new starts and we feel akin to that,’ said Douglas. ‘It all started in the desert where I grew up. There wasn’t much else other than Inca art and I became fascinated by it.’ He started to collect in Africa when he first travelled there on wine business. After years of experience he knew – better than many locals – where to cut the best deals in antique markets ranging from the Portobello Road in London to Hollywood Road in Hong Kong. His artistic taste went through various phases: African, Indian, Nepalese and Tibetan, Chinese, Aboriginal and, most recently, South Pacific Polynesian – a cultural gazetteer that mirrors some of the 100-plus countries in which Montes wines are now found. Over the course of 35 years of wine selling Douglas spent on average 7 months of the year away from home. He partly attributed his success in gaining the interest of importers to his interest in connecting with other cultures. ‘I am interested in the spirit of places and people. When you understand their cultures and religions, you have a closer cultural communion and see that they put a lot of trust in their gods. And I respect them for that,’ he said. To trace Douglas’s roots and account for this Scottish-sounding Chilean, we must go back to the Douglas on the edge of the world’s biggest hole: the 800early years of the twentieth century. The Atacama metre-deep, 3.5-kilometre-wide Chuquicamata copper desert was supplying the newly industrialized world mine in the Atacama desert. The site has been a source of with mineral nitrates, a basic ingredient of two agents the metal since pre-Hispanic times and Douglas’s Chilean grandfather helped develop the mine in the 1920s of growth and destruction: fertilizer and gunpowder. The remote northern Chilean port of Iquique was one of the hubs of an industry in which the British had such a strong interest that it amounted to near-colonial control. From the 1870s onwards, vast nitrate fortunes were made on stock markets around the world from this outpost. (So much so that it attracted the interest of André Simon, founder of the International Wine and Food Society, and long-time sales rep of Pommery & Gremo champagne. Simon travelled extensively around North and South America in the 1910s selling champagne. The story goes that he arrived at Iquique, and in that desert port he found a ready market of very rich, very thirsty customers. After his sales tasting, head office at Rheims in France were nonplussed to receive a telegram from Simon advising them that the magnates of Iquique wanted to order Pommery’s total production of champagne for the next vintage.) It was to Iquique that Douglas’s grandfather sailed from Scotland with his family in the 1910s, where he set up the ‘Tienda Inglesa’, a shop to supply the British community with goods from home. Douglas’s father later went into shipping and was posted further down the desert coast to Chile’s biggest mineral port, Antofagasta, where he met his
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Chilean/Italian wife and was eventually appointed British Honorary Consul. Douglas was born in Antofagasta in 1942. Antofagasta in the 1940s and 50s was a remote place to grow up. ‘I am a product of the desert – it developed my character. Fresh water was a precious commodity and there were no excesses. You learnt how to be alone, how to persevere. As a boy, I used to go off and spend days at a time out in the desert on my own. The desert has its spirit,’ said Douglas of these biblical-sounding experiences that in later life stood him in good stead for solitary times away from home.
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‘ Douglas is lovable with a capital L. He has a way with people that you either have or you don’t. Don’t underestimate him – he devours information and when he says it’s intuitive, you know in fact that it’s well backed with knowledge.’ Alfredo on Douglas
The invention in the 1920s of artificially produced fertilizer slowly killed off Chile’s mineral nitrate business. The days when champagne flowed in the mining towns of the north were over. There was wine around but Douglas’s father, being a true Scot, enjoyed his whisky. Tankers of bulk wine were trucked up the then dirt-track Pan-American Highway from Santiago, for bottling in local bodegas. But this wine, which from the outset was probably oxidized, did not improve much from the hot, three-day road trip across the desert. Perhaps unsurprisingly Douglas did not fall under wine’s spell in Chile but elsewhere, in Spain. His perpetual boyhood horizons of ocean and sand implanted a lifelong appetite for travel. He decided to go to college in the USA, where he studied business and economics at Valdosta, Georgia. Missing his desert, he naturally returned there after graduating and started work for the Anaconda mining company. That was in 1965. In 1970, the Marxist Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile. Having learnt of the effects of that kind of socialism from some friends in Cuba, Douglas and his young wife Lucy decided that the best thing was to leave Chile. Lucy’s family were Spanish and it was either there or the USA. Lucy won the argument and Spain it was. Douglas’s first proper contact with wine was through the Spanish corporation Rumasa, a privately owned fiefdom of hundreds of businesses in the drinks, banking and construction worlds (later nationalized, then split up by the Spanish socialist government in 1983). Douglas worked as the export director for Rumasa and came into contact with wine through the business’s sherry, Penedes and Rioja interests. The beauty of the sherry bodegas in Jerez and the picturesque old cellars of Paternina and Bodegas Franco-Españolas captivated him. It was here too that he first appreciated the sensitivity needed for taking wine across cultures. He had as a visitor at the Paternina bodegas a supposedly expert and highly knowledgeable Japanese buyer. Douglas prepared for the visit by asking the cellar-keeper to line up a collection of rare, old vintages of Douglas and Lucy on the desert coast at Chañaral in 1968, when they both worked in copper 35
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Rioja for the special visitor to taste. Presented with the dozen or so wines, the visitor looked blankly at Douglas and then, without a word, proceeded to knock back a glassful of each wine in rapid succession. The cellar-keeper did not speak to Douglas for six months. It was Rumasa that brought Douglas and his young family back to Chile. In 1980, it entered into a joint venture with a Chilean banking conglomerate called the BHC group. Together, Rumasa and BHC bought Viña San Pedro and Douglas became export manager. But returning to Chile was something of a business culture shock. ‘When I arrived back in Chile from Spain, it was like returning to the country of the blind,’ said Douglas. ‘Wine exports from Chile outside South America were practically non-existent.’ And at San Pedro they were in a sorry state. ‘There was one order on the export books, just one, and we didn’t even have labels to bottle the wine.’ Douglas had his work cut out; but it was through San Pedro that he would meet Alfredo and Aurelio.
ALFREDO ‘I really enjoy solving knotty financial problems,’ Alfredo Vidaurre, Montes’ founding financial brain, used to say. ‘I sleep with paper and pencil next to my bed, so that when I wake up at night bothered by a financial conundrum, I can jot it down straight away. The next day, I find the problem is half-solved already.’ Such were the simple methods of a man whose career spanned the highest peaks of Chilean academia and wine. Alfredo could trace his family ancestry back to the Spanish conquest. His father was a senior official Alfredo’s collection of vehicles included this 1957 Chevrolet in the Post Office and his uncle was a cardinal. When pickup, in full Montes livery, used to ferry visitors I first met Alfredo, he recollected in perfect midAtlantic English the long afternoons he had spent as a boy on the cricket outfield at The Grange school in Santiago. ‘My mother liked to say she had two only-children, as there were 18 years between me and my elder brother. She was determined not to pamper me and so she sent me to one of the British schools here,’ he said. The discipline clearly worked, as Alfredo went on to a precocious academic career. By giving lectures and private classes himself, he paid his own way through university, studying business administration and economics. He then won a two-year Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to the University of Chicago, a popular destination for Chile’s top economics
‘ We almost never see eye to eye, but I trust him implicitly. He would act against his own interests if need be – there aren’t many like that.’ Douglas on Alfredo
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At Viña San Pedro, Aurelio’s remit as head of production included the unlikely task of making whisky. Combining Scottish malt concentrate, Argentine grain alcohol and Chilean water, the firm produced a brand for domestic distribution. A visitor from the Scottish distillery Bowmore advises Alfredo and Aurelio in this 1985 photocall
students at the time (a group of whom, known as the ‘Chicago Boys’, steered Chile’s economic reforms of the 1970s, influenced by the free-market evangelizing of Chicago’s Professor Milton Friedman). Obliged by the terms of his scholarship to return to teaching at the Catholic University, Alfredo’s academic career culminated in his becoming the youngest ever Dean of the Faculty of Business Administration and Management at the astonishingly young age of 29. Chile cannot have been the easiest of environments in which to teach business after the election in 1970 of the Marxist President Allende. ‘It was not so much socialism, as all-out class war,’ Alfredo said. ‘The School of Management at the university was on a separate site from the main campus, which the Marxists took over. Students at the School took a rather different view from the Marxists and we had a virtual siege on our hands.’ After three years of Allende government, Alfredo had had enough and decided to leave Chile with his family for Panama, where he advised the Panamanian government on public project evaluation. Four weeks later, the Pinochet military coup took place in Santiago. After four years in Panama Alfredo returned to Chile and joined the banking group BHC as head of investments, which teamed up with Rumasa to buy Viña San Pedro. Alfredo’s introduction to wine had been the task of rescuing the near-bankrupt winery from closure. But it was also where he met Douglas and Aurelio, introductions that were to change the lives of all three of them. In the early 2000s, Alfredo learnt that he had an extremely rare, debilitating and incurable motor neurone disease. He lived in the knowledge that slowly his body would fail him, and bore this with great courage. He died in 2008 at the age of 65, having
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dedicated the last 20 years of his life to Montes. Although he was not a wine trade professional at the outset, he brought his considerable intellect and great enthusiasm to the project, and immersed himself in every aspect of the business. This extended to his leading Montes’ corporate responsibility work, through which local schools close to the vineyards are given financial help. ‘Alfredo fell in love with wine and became intensely interested in every aspect of it. He was never happier than when guiding visitors round the vineyards at Apalta, which he did with boyish enthusiasm,’ says Aurelio. Alfredo is commemorated by the Apalta visitor café named after him, as was a scholarship at the UK’s Institute of Masters of Wine funded by Montes. The British illustrator Ralph Steadman, designer of several Montes labels, described Alfredo as ‘the third, inspired partner of this trinity, a Shakespearean accountant no less, who balances their books like poetry and tempers their raw animal enthusiasm with a financial whip’.
VIÑA SAN PEDRO The early 1980s were financially shaky times for Chile. The world economy was in recession, and in 1982 alone, Chile’s gross national product dropped by a massive 13 per cent, a slump worse than any experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s. A year later it fell a further three points. Unemployment soared while consumer demand plummeted. In buying Viña San Pedro, Rumasa and the BHC group had taken on a business that owed more than $5 million in debt. The rationale behind the joint purchase had been that Rumasa’s expertise would lift the winemaking to international standard and BHC would provide banking know-how and soft loans at low rates. But they couldn’t, because interest rates kept creeping up. Things went from bad to worse and eventually the BHC group and Rumasa fell out, forcing the Rumasa staff back to Spain. Douglas, although back at home in Chile, was counted as one of the latter, and not wishing to return to Spain was therefore out of a job. The economic conditions in Chile came to a head when the Pinochet government decided to devalue the peso, after it had urged the transfer of debt into dollars. The whole banking system itself was bankrupt. Alfredo, who had been head of investment research at the BHC group, was sent in to troubleshoot at San Pedro. He was an academic used to analysis rather than management, but with the BHC group falling apart and nothing left to analyse, he willingly took up the task of trying to save the ailing producer. First, he had to put a team together to achieve a turnaround. So he rehired Douglas to develop the export sales and bring in muchneeded hard dollar currency. Then he managed to persuade Aurelio – who was understandably reluctant – to leave Undurraga and join as head of production and winemaker. Winemakers tend to operate as a competitively collaborative group and Aurelio was also doing some consultancy work for other producers. He knew that his skills were transferable to another winery if need be; in addition, his old professor from university, Alejandro Hernández, was one of the winemakers at San Pedro. When asked about his financial whizz-kid reputation at Montes, Alfredo would say that if you ask any so-called whizz-kid about their success, they will tell you that it is all common sense. ‘At Viña San Pedro we bought in around 80 per cent of our requirement for grapes and wine; 20 per cent we produced ourselves. The thing was to be able to buy
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grapes or wine on credit. Every winery did this then, but it was particularly difficult if you were a winery that was considered almost bankrupt. It took a lot of doing, believe me. I suppose getting closer to our suppliers and presenting an image of solvency – there was a kind of wizardry in that.’ So there were Alfredo, Douglas and Aurelio working together with a handful of others on the San Pedro management The art and science of wine: in the lab at Viña San team. The board of directors were nonPedro, Aurelio tastes his way through a collection of Cabernet Sauvignons operational bankers and not that interested in wine; just profits. ‘We really had no-one to direct our prayers at,’ said Alfredo. ‘The company was in deep trouble and we were on our own. Against adversity it made for a very close-knit team.’ (Afterwards nicknamed the ‘Vietnam veterans’.) At one point, Alfredo wanted to take steps to raise the morale of the workforce. Aurelio suggested planting a not insubstantial 50 hectares of Merlot in a prominent location visible from the main road near Curicó. Alfredo agreed in principle, but given there was no money, he did not see how it could be financed. Aurelio’s plan was simple and low cost: plant cuttings taken from the pruning of existing Merlot vines. There was no need to buy stakes and training wires, as shoots that young wouldn’t need them for a year. The plan bought time and morale (and it turned out to be a very good vineyard). Financially, the business was still on life support and eventually Alfredo was compelled to contact the state bank of Chile, Banco del Estado for help. He said that if it didn’t assist, the revenue service would call in the debts owed, whereas if it put up fresh money, Alfredo would be in a better position to negotiate, as there would be some money to pay the taxes. He heard nothing. In a last-ditch attempt, he sent faxes to the Ministers of Labour, of Agriculture, and of Economics, putting it plainly that Viña San Pedro had only enough money left for a few weeks; that there was the prospect of huge job losses; could they help? The Economics Minister telephoned and invited Alfredo over for a chat. On his arrival, Alfredo was surprised to find the head of the Banco del Estado waiting in the entrance lobby. The minister asked Alfredo to explain the situation. He presented a solution to which the Banco del Estado assented: a debt-for-equity swap making Banco del Estado the majority shareholder. It gave the bank the right to appoint the chairman of the new board of directors. But while San Pedro had found its salvation, Alfredo hadn’t: he was promptly sacked by his new masters. For Aurelio and Douglas, their time together at Viña San Pedro was a perfect platform from which to develop their ideas; to explore export markets, find out what wine drinkers wanted and work on developing wines to match. It was they, the executive, not the board, who made the decisions; who planted the new vineyards; who opened up markets and determined the style of wines. In doing so they were laying the foundations for their own enterprise that was to follow.
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Aurelio was able to continue the trials and experimentation that he had started at Undurraga. Changing the mindset and habits of the company was an enormous challenge, from the vineyard workers up to the assistant winemakers. His personal goal was to make better-quality wines and yet Aurelio still had to produce the mass-market factory brands for local consumption. In a country of Chile’s gentlemen (and ladies) of wine: legendary fertility where the reduction of a the Cofradía del Mérito Vitivinícola harvest was antithetical to the notion of In the early 1990s, Chile’s wine leaders progress, Aurelio began to lower yields by created their own brotherhood. The bunch thinning, with the aim of producing Cofradía is an elite and influential more concentrated wines. He also knew the group dedicated to furthering the cause benefits that new oak could have in the of Chilean wine. Membership is ageing of red wines. Despite an abundance of automatic for those voted Chile’s timber in Chile (and a thriving logging Winemaker of the Year, or by business) the indigenous oak is not suitable invitation occasionally extended to for wines. Viña San Pedro was the non-winemakers. Aurelio is a member joint-first Chilean winery to import French by virtue of election by his peers as oak barrels, from the renowned cooper Winemaker of the Year in 1995. Seguin-Moreau, that were used for ageing the Douglas was presented with his poncho best Cabernet, now a given for top wines (the and hat in 2002. The Cofradía consignment of barriques arrived in the same honoured Chile’s son of poetry, Pablo vessel as a batch for Viña Santa Rita). One of Neruda, with posthumous Aurelio’s early achievements was a gold membership, in recognition of the medal in 1985 at Vinexpo, the world’s largest Nobel Prizewinner’s love of wine wine fair. But it was not for a Cabernet Sauvignon, as might be expected. The prize went to his cool-fermented Sauvignon Blanc. It was the first time that a Chilean winemaker has been awarded a gold at Vinexpo. And for it to be awarded for a white wine made it even more of an achievement. In his eight years at Viña San Pedro, Douglas had taken the export sales from zero to 300,000 cases of wine. At first, money was needed in advance to buy the bottles and the labels. ‘You can’t get much worse than that,’ he said. Despite politics-based resistance to Chilean wine (particularly trenchant in Europe) the world map hanging on the wall of his office became dotted with more and more small red pins: successful new markets. Douglas and Aurelio became close friends at San Pedro and they began to share a common vision. The signs were promising. Even with high vineyard yields of up to 200 hectolitres per hectare and poor equipment, the basic quality of the wines was good. They also saw the early foreign investors beginning to show an interest in Chile; French too, none other indeed than Château Lafite, which invested in Viña Los Vascos. And with Aurelio’s trials and yield reductions, they felt sure that a quantum leap in quality was achievable. One episode in particular was hugely confidence-boosting, and it came from the direction of the Napa Valley in California. In 1985, Chuck Wagner Jr of Caymus Vineyards, one of the most rated Cabernet producers in Napa, paid a visit to Chile looking for a supply of wine for a
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second label called Liberty School. After visiting various producers, he was taken by Aurelio’s reduced-yield, barrel-aged Cabernet, which would later be bottled under the newly created Castillo de Molina label. A vintage was ordered and shipped to California (furthermore, the following year one went to an importer in Bordeaux). ‘That was a significant moment, something of a turning point for us,’ said Douglas. ‘It was a real eye-opener. An indicator from a distant and quality-conscious market of the demands Chile could meet.’ The Viña San Pedro board of directors was concerned that Aurelio and Douglas were spending too much time on distractions and not paying enough attention to wines at the basic level. The wine employment culture was different in those days and there was no room for such a thing as a star winemaker who could determine direction. Against the backdrop of Aurelio’s and Douglas’s frustration and the clash of cultural objectives with the board of directors, it was only a matter of time before the two of them began to ferment their own plans. Aurelio clearly remembers the day he walked into his office, closed the door behind him, sat down and set out his dream on a simple spreadsheet. The world’s wine-drinking patterns were changing and consumers were drinking less, but better, wine. He put together a rudimentary plan for a type of wine business new to Chile: one modelled on the single-estate concept – not making factory brands, but limited quantities of topquality ‘premium’ wine for export. Aurelio asked Douglas in and straight away he had a partner. They knew that no bank would lend against them so they had to seek funding from a private backer. The obvious choice was Alfredo, whom they thought had money. It was at a black-tie charity dinner that Aurelio cornered him and spelt out their plan. Alfredo’s reaction was swift: ‘I’ll buy into the project. I love the team. I’ll go with you. So what about a winery?’ Building one was simply out of the question, because there were insufficient funds. Aurelio knew that among his many contacts he would be able to turn to someone. He invited a couple of grower-producers into the partnership, and to their eternal regrets they both turned the offer down. There was, however, another character whom they all knew in varying degrees: Pedro Grand.
‘ Pedro is an outstanding engineer by default; he sees the future, anticipates change and prepares facilities in the winery. The fact is, every time he constructs a building or buys a new tank, we argue. Pedro carries on and, inevitably, I realize I was wrong. For example, he was right about constructing an isolated room for wines undergoing malolactic fermentation and for double-thickness jackets for cooling the tanks.’ Aurelio on Pedro
PEDRO Pedro Grand’s family has been growing grapes and making wine near Curicó for more than half a century. But you would never have seen their name on a wine label. That is because Pedro was, and still is, one of the many growers who far outnumber the bottlers in Chile. They supply other wineries with grapes, or indeed wine, as part of an established tradition. Although Pedro is no longer a shareholder in Montes, he was as key to the
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success of Montes as the other three founding partners. Pedro’s ancestry is Franco-Italian, his engineer great-grandfather having left France in the early 1860s to work for the company that constructed the Santiago to Valparaíso railway. His Italian grandmother was a harpist who settled in Chile in 1910. So like many winemakers, Pedro is part-scientist, part-artist. Encouraged by his father, Pedro went to learn his trade and connect with his French Pedro in the cellar of his ‘intelligent’ house at Curicó roots at the University of Montpellier in France, one of the world’s pre-eminent nurseries of wine talent. He returned home in the mid1950s, bursting with winemaking knowledge and technical know-how, but utterly frustrated at the backward state of the country’s winemaking infrastructure: difficult-toclean iron equipment, old cloth filters, and vats made from rauli, a native beech. His mission ever since has been innovation in the winery, travelling abroad and bringing back the latest ideas in winemaking hardware, from hydraulic German presses to state-of-theart bottling lines from Italy. ‘If I had to single out someone who inspired me the most it would be the Spanish winemaker Miguel Torres, the man who brought stainless steel to Chile in the late 1970s. He has been my source of enthusiasm and inspiration,’ says Pedro. With his vision for the new wine business uppermost in his mind, Aurelio called Pedro and invited him for dinner at his small house in Molina near Curicó to talk over the plans. But Pedro was hesitant, and it was only after his secretary urged him to take up the offer of a meeting that he met up with his future business partner. Aurelio outlined the plan and explained the need to rent part of a winery to make the wine. Pedro’s reaction was immediate. He wanted none of that: he wanted in on the venture. Aurelio’s original business plan was beginning to take proper shape. Grapes would come from the small vineyard holdings that he owned, which amounted to about 30 hectares. Salaries were out of the question, so he would make the wine for nothing and continue his consultancy work. Douglas’s input would be working on exports, also unpaid for a number of years. Pedro’s contribution would be the free use of his winery, Viña Los Nogales, up to a certain capacity, and the equipment there for producing and bottling the wine. Alfredo would put up the capital sum of just over 15 million pesos or US$62,000 (‘It was absolutely nothing,’ he said). Target sales, ambitious at the time, were initially 30,000 cases, and 50,000 to be reached by year five; the first markets would be the UK and USA. Declaring its mission, the company’s name was originally the inviting slogan ‘Discover Wine’. This was later changed to the eponymous Montes, matching the name already on the labels and evoking the mountain imagery used in their designs. The partners met weekly on Monday evenings at Alfredo’s house in Las Condes, Santiago’s sylvan suburb. It was tough in the early stages. Although he had been offered a seat on the board and potentially lucrative shares by the new banker owners of Viña San Pedro, Douglas was
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well aware of their asset-stripping rather than wine-improving intentions; so he resigned. He needed a source of income and was invited by Alfredo to join a ceramic tile producer called Recsa Cordillera, which he joined with his ever-loyal secretary from San Pedro, Sonia Montanares. He remained there for two demanding years while Discover Wine began. Still with other work commitments to shoulder, in the early months all the partners worked into the small hours as Discover Wine took shape. Aurelio found the first year particularly stressful and remembers the dark clouds of mid-life crisis hanging over him. ‘I was 39, I had five young children and I had no money. I used to wake up in the morning and feel quite desperate. That first year was very difficult but it brought me and my family closer together. I was particularly hard on myself and would prune the vineyards on my own as a form of punishment,’ he remembers. ‘We felt that there was music in the air, yet no-one else was hearing the music from the market. We felt everyone else was on the beach and we were swimming in the ocean waiting for the waves. We saw the wave coming, we swam and jumped on the board and we surfed it all the way. And we are still on it.’ From a simple shared vision and very modest resources, a form of alchemy took place that produced a range of wines that rapidly propelled Montes to the status of a ‘first growth’.
OTHER JOSÉ
DIRECTORS: ANTONIO JR AND MATÍAS GARCÉS
The experience and wisdom behind the Garcés Silva family business empire should bring benefits to any boardroom. From dairy and wheat farms in the south of Chile, to finance, Coca-Cola distribution, and property in Argentina, they have fingers in many business pies. They are also viticulturalists and winemaking pioneers in the relatively new coastal area of Leyda, where they set up the boutique Amayna winery. With vineyards 14 kilometres from the coast, it produces very limited quantities of exquisitely crafted wines, primarily Sauvignon Blanc (oak-aged, unusually) and Pinot Noir, plus Syrah and Chardonnay, that have a near-cult following. José Antonio Garcés is the head of the family, and his sons José Antonio Jr and Matías now represent it as highly valued directors of Montes. Matías explains why they found Montes such an attractive investment: ‘We saw the perfect team to help grow and expand. Through a mutual friend, the agronomist Roberto Pizarro, we made the Montes team aware that we would be interested in investing. So when in 1999 Aurelio opened a small window of opportunity to invest in 2.5 per cent of the company, we took it. In Aurelio, we saw someone who had changed the winemaking industry in Chile. In Douglas, we saw someone who was different from other exporters, in his utter belief in his product and his ambition to spread Montes to all corners The Garcés Silva family
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of the globe. They are hard acts to follow for the next generation. And of course there was Alfredo, who kept their feet on the ground. There is a pride in the Montes workforce – they really “wear the shirt”, as we say. On average they give 15 years’ service, which is unusually long in Chile. Something that defines Montes is its lack of pretension. New entrants in the wine industry can easily fall victim to pretentiousness. But not Montes. They do things step-by-step and without extravagance, and we liked that. They set high goals and relish challenges.’
SERGIO BARROS Chilean table grapes have become as ubiquitous as Chilean wines. That’s not surprising when you learn that Chile’s blessed climate and ambitious exporters have made her the world’s leading producer not only of table grapes, but also of plums, blueberries and apples (and close to number one for a whole basketful of other fruit as well). So there’s a fair chance that a bunch of Chilean table grapes near you has been produced by Rio King (formerly Rio Blanco), by any measure the country’s largest producer. From oasis vineyards in the irrigated desert lands around Copiapo in the north to orchards in the south near Talca, the company ships grapes, kiwis, cherries, pears and clementines directly to supermarkets in the UK and rest of Europe, across South America, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Russia and Norway. The Chairman of Rio King, Sergio Barros, is a shareholder of Montes. He is represented on the board by his son Andrés and son-in-law Nicolás Parot, Rio King’s export director, who explains how the two businesses came together: ‘Agustín Huneeus, owner of Veramonte winery, and Pedro Grand both wanted to sell some of their shares in Montes. Sergio Barros knows the Grand family and thus the link was made. We looked at the balance sheet, the price was right and everything was set. The two companies share the same passion for quality, but other than that, table grapes and wine grapes are worlds apart. Although we are both in the business of growing grapes, production methods and values are very different. The fruit business is about volume – very different to wine at the Montes level. The wine business is more artistic. It has more heart! And there’s branding and personality. We have learnt a lot from the Montes export team. They are a comparatively small bunch of people, audacious, and with the courage of their convictions. We have benefited a lot from this by being more adventurous ourselves – by taking on new challenges.’
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A
one of Chile’s most able practitioners in the winery, Aurelio Montes readily acknowledges that ‘80 per cent of a great wine is made in the vineyard, and 20 per cent in the winery’. His recognition of the importance of the vineyard contrasts with the perception of wine in Chile’s domestic market that is still firmly based on producers’ brands. Chile’s wine laws are moving towards enshrining the notion of terroir, but there is a long way to go before they equate to those of the Old World. In a country exploring its wine possibilities, producers are fortunate that they can plant pretty well what grape varieties they want, where they want, with few prescribed practices and no controls on yields. The only obligation on growers is to fill in forms for government statistics. Exploration has brought a change of attitude. Producers analyse local terroirs more closely, as they search for the country’s best locations, and associate wine – in export marketing at least – more closely with its geographical origins. New denominations of origin are being created, as the wine map is refined on the basis of smaller areas rather than broad administrative regions. LTHOUGH ACKNOWLEDGED AS
A senior Cabernet vine at the old Micaela vineyard Previous pages: vineyards at Apalta 48
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The founding partners of Montes had come together via Viña San Pedro, and their former employer indirectly provided them with some of the vines to make the first Montes wines. By tradition, a 9-hectare parcel of historic Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay vines at Micaela, south of Curicó, was owned by the head winemaker of Viña San Pedro; upon leaving the firm, the ex-incumbent would sell the vineyard on to his successor. No written record exists of when the Micaela vines were planted, but it is almost certain that they originated from cuttings brought over from France in 1865 by Viña San Pedro’s founder. When Aurelio left the firm, his successor broke with tradition and declined the invitation to buy the centenarian vines. In aiming to lower the yields and up the concentration of the must, Aurelio drastically changed Micaela’s irrigation regime, knowing that the superannuated pensioners would have long-since developed root systems deep enough to find sufficient water. From one flood irrigation a month, their water ration was reduced to one a year. Older vines are generally considered to produce better-quality wine and these extra vieilles vignes did indeed produce wine of a quality in linear proportion to their great age. Their historic status also provided the wines with an extra marketing edge for Douglas. The last of the Cabernet Sauvignon vines, which were perhaps some of the world’s oldest at nearly 140 years, finally had to be grubbed up some years ago, and the former vineyard is now planted with table grapes and a cherry orchard. The Micaela vines’ old age was testimony to the very long and productive life achievable by vines that grow on their own roots. Survivors were transplanted to become historical curiosities outside their retirement home at the Apalta winery. Montes has always bought grapes from growers as well as growing their own. In the early years and with limited funds, the four founding partners were well known enough in the wine industry that their personal credibility vouched for them more than any balance sheet could have done when negotiating with growers. ‘Chile is a small country and people know each other,’ Alfredo said. ‘Starting with no cash and having to rely on reputation is actually something of an advantage in a small country. When we began, there was an oversupply of grapes, so it was much easier than if we were starting now.’ Grape buying practices now have changed a lot since the late 1980s. To obtain the quality that Aurelio knew was necessary for success, educating growers was needed. ‘I knew we could do things far better than we were doing before, for example picking at the correct ripeness, and taking better care of the grapes. Simple things,’ Aurelio says. At a time when the price of grapes in Chile was determined solely on their potential to produce alcohol (i.e. sugar content), he recalls coming up against the old-fashioned beliefs of peasant growers. Their winemaking was rooted in folklore rather than twentieth-century viticulture. ‘Regardless of the grapes’ maturity, for example, the date for the harvest would always be grandfather’s birthday, or a holy day, simply because it always had been,’ he says. Even today, the harvest time in less enlightened vineyards of Chile is still fixed without reference to the grapes’ ripeness, but now it is the schedule of a transient workforce of pickers, rather than tradition, that determines when picking starts: grapes here one week; tomatoes there the next. Above all, Aurelio talks about the growers simply not believing in quality; there was no commitment to it, because the
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demands were not there. They used dirty, old vats that people were even very proud of (because grandfather had bought them). Entrenched ideas had to be removed that took a lot of time and effort. Aurelio’s strategy is never to become totally self-sufficient for grapes; he is happy to buy in around 30 per cent of requirements. Still on the lookout for new potential, Aurelio monitors the quality across different localities. As a consultant working up and down the country, now providing spiritual rather than practical guidance, he has an outstanding shop window to browse. When Montes started he could point to vineyards and say to growers: ‘I want that parcel of vines … plus that one … and that one’. He knew the quality of the different lots and could cherry-pick the best grapes. These days, buying in grapes is not just a matter of going to market at the time of harvest. It is more like vineyard leasing from one harvest to the next, or for a set number of years. Inch-thick contracts with growers are very detailed and demanding, specifying how the vines are to be maintained, down to the level of pruning, grape cluster size and the precisely measured daily amount of irrigation per vine. Contrary to the assumption that buying from growers inevitably means compromising on quality, weekly on-site inspections by Montes staff ensure that grapes are cultivated to a standard, as if they were their own. As Chile’s regions have developed their own reputations, contract prices for grapes from the top areas and their growers command the highest prices. Montes also currently has long-term contracts with growers in Casablanca, Leyda, Tricao and Itata valleys. Situated between Santiago and the port of Valparaíso, previously vine-less Casablanca was ‘discovered’ in the 1980s and is now one of the prime regions for white grape production, renowned for the quality of its Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Montes considered buying their own land in Casablanca, but decided against it because it was too far from their centre of operations in Colchagua. Bathed in pearly coastal light, young Sauvignon Blanc vines flutter in the sea breeze at Leyda. Plastic sleeves protect the soft stems from rabbits
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Zapallar: young Montes vines stand alone in this wine frontier landscape, source of the Outer Limits Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir, and Sparkling Angel
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Leyda is one of the more recent Chilean locations to make it onto the wine atlas. This coastal region south of Casablanca is one of the most westerly vineyard areas in Chile. Montes has a 20-year lease of 50 hectares from the Garcés family, producing Pinot Noir and some of Chile’s most praiseworthy Sauvignon Blanc. Close to Leyda, and even closer to the sea, is Tricao, where a new contract exists with a grower of what Aurelio tantalizingly describes as ‘amazing’ Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and Riesling. Montes’ own coastal, vineyard activity has been on undulating hills eight kilometres from the upmarket resort of Zapallar, near the country’s famous beaches at Viña del Mar (where, despite the name, there are no vineyards). The route to Zapallar was via Montes’ General Manager, Andrés Turner, whose family had been holidaying in the area for decades, and who teamed up with other family members and Aurelio to buy land privately for planting a vineyard in 2005. Montes is still the only winery with vineyards in cool-climate, cloud-prone Zapallar, and this may remain the case, given the area’s lack of water for irrigation. Other producers must be looking in envy at what Aurelio’s farsightedness achieved in planting in this relatively severe zone. The wind and strong coastal influence restrain the vines’ growth, concentrating juice in the grapes and producing outstanding Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, mainly bottled under the Outer Limits label with the DO Aconcagua Costa. The heightened freshness of
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the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir also provide Aurelio with just the right raw material he needs for making Montes’ celebratory bubbly, Sparkling Angel, made using the traditional (i.e. champagne) method and first released in 2015 to immediate critical acclaim.
LA FINCA
DE
APALTA, COLCHAGUA VALLEY
Vines have been grown in the Colchagua Valley, 180 kilometres south of Santiago, since the time of the Spanish conquest. Long known as an area from which large producers sourced grapes in bulk from old family estates, it has risen to prominence as one of Chile’s top red-wine regions. This is thanks to a number of internationally famous investors and wineries, including Montes, searching out new terroirs within. Running east to west, Colchagua is bounded by high hills, the Lomas de Pangalillo to the north and the Loma Grande to the south. From the Andes the Tinguiririca river winds its way westwards, broadening out across a flat-valley landscape of fruit fields, willows and poplars, typical of central Chile. Colchagua has a warm climate and, because of the river influence, a high water table and fertile soils. Colchagua is where Chile’s multi-million-dollar wine economy and the country’s rural tradition meet. Old veranda-fronted adobe houses now share the landscape with architect-designed, emblematic wineries with tourist facilities. The picturesque colonial town of Santa Cruz, badly damaged during the 2010 earthquake, is Colchagua’s hub, and the scene of a traditional vintage festival after the harvest. Chile’s version of the cowboy, the huaso, wearing large, spiky spurs and cloak slung over shoulder (something of a cliché elsewhere), here still authentically works the land on horseback. Ubiquitous brown road-signs indicate the Colchaguan producers that have contributed to Chile’s first winetourism trail, the Ruta de Vino de Colchagua.
Looking southeast across the slopes of the La Finca de Apalta estate, towards the Colchagua Valley, with head-trained Mourvèdre vines in the foreground
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Within Chile’s denomination of origin system, famous valleys such as the Maipo and Casablanca are given ‘region’ status. Colchagua, despite having achieved near-equal fame and distinction, is grouped with its immediate neighbour to the north, the Cachapoal Valley, to form the topographically meaningless Rapel Valley region, highlighting both the DO system’s loose use of the term ‘valley’ and the need for it to catch up with Colchagua’s reputation. As Aurelio says, ‘Colchaguan producers have been shouting a lot and the result is recognition, much more so than neighbouring Cachapoal, which could have as much potential as Colchagua.’ Back in 1972, fresh out of college and in his first winemaking job at Viña Undurraga, Aurelio had been dispatched to the then unknown part of Colchagua called Apalta, to buy grapes from a local grower. Although described (in the Chilean way) as a valley, Apalta is more Apalta’s shape gives it a sense of purpose. The name is correctly a three-kilometre-wide crescent Mapuche Indian and provides a clue to the area’s within the Pangalillo range of hills. At its potential for winegrowing: it means ‘poor soils’ back, the range’s highest peak, Cerro Divisadero, rises up 1,214 metres above sea level, from which tall spurs half-encircle an amphitheatre-like bowl of hillside that descends and flattens out onto the river plain. On his first visit, Aurelio was struck by the sheer power of the open space, like a giant crucible focusing the clear Andean light, and he fell in love with the place. He sampled grapes on offer and was immediately impressed by what he tasted. ‘Now here … is quality,’ he remembers saying to himself. After that, he was able to sample and buy more Apalta grapes while at Viña San Pedro and became quietly convinced of the location’s special qualities.
Huasos, familiar figures in Colchaguan wine country, at the rodeo
In the early 1990s, the shape and dynamics at the top end of the Chilean wine-supply chain were changing. Many high-quality growers from whom Montes had bought grapes were now bottling and selling their own wine. Montes’ sales were on the up and demand for its wine was almost causing a problem. The time had come for them, as a firm, to buy their own vineyard holdings.
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Back in 1996, when the slopes of Apalta were cleared, and Aurelio had to plan the vineyard
Land around the company’s then area of operations, Curicó, was not an option, simply because prices had risen to prohibitively high levels and there was no good, affordable land left. The still-unrecognized area of Apalta, so long in the back of Aurelio’s mind, was a much more viable option because no-one had even considered it. ‘It took 20 years to be able to buy the piece of land at Apalta that I dreamt of,’ he says. ‘It was quite easy, though, because no-one else was looking. No-one else believed in Apalta.’ Although there was no competition, the question of how the land was to be bought had to be answered. The firm did not have enough money of its own and partners would have to buy the land themselves. Douglas, however, was unable to contribute any money of his own into the purchase, yet did not want his stake in Montes to be diluted by new investors. The solution was to set up a separate company to buy the site (which a few years later merged into Montes), owned by the three other partners and outsiders (one of whom was Martin Wright, Montes’ first British importer, making Apalta the first AngloChilean vineyard venture). The plot of land that Montes bought, which they called La Finca de Apalta, lies in the very centre of Apalta; an inner-crescent, within the larger outer one. Part and parcel of the 500-hectare plot was a sizeable chunk of the Divisadero hill that rises behind the much smaller portion of flat valley fields. The conventional approach would have been to plant vines on land that been planted before, the lower incline only. But Aurelio had higher ambitions. He wanted to plant up on the hillside, onto the slopes, the type of land that has been recognized as producing better-quality wines since the time of the ancient Romans. In the course of Chile’s 400 years of winemaking in the Central Valley, however,
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it had been neither necessary nor possible to plant on such slopes. Growing vines on the extensive, fertile and flood-irrigated flat of the valley floor was easier. Without the recent (and expensive) technology of piped drip-irrigation and given the dry summer climate, planting on hillsides was impossible. To intentionally plant up into the slopes was a ground-breaking move. In the northern hemisphere’s more marginal winegrowing latitudes, growers plant on hillsides to increase vines’ exposure to the sun; to help the grapes ripen. In Apalta, where guaranteed summer sun never makes ripening a problem, Aurelio did not want to help the vines. He wanted to make life more difficult for them; to make them put their energies into reproductive, rather than vegetative growth. ‘To get away from the fertile valley floor where they grow too easily and vigorously … and stress them a little,’ he says. The clearing of Apalta was an act of faith of Herculean proportions in unchartered viticultural territory. Whole swathes of forest and bush had to be uprooted and removed. Seven hundred lorry-loads of large granite boulders that littered the slopes had to be removed or buried. Hundreds of kilometres of irrigation pipes were laid and extensive channelling dug out. The whole operation cost a financially draining 40 per cent more than it would have done for a valley-floor vineyard. Montes was struggling financially and according to Aurelio ‘The lack of money was the biggest drama. Every stone removed and each vine planted was a painful cost.’ Syrah vines give way to protected oaks and shrubs on the upper slopes of Apalta
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ZAPALLAR
Zapallar
VIÑA ZAPALLAR ESTATE
Aconcagua River
Viña del Mar Valparaíso
Santiago Leyda
San Antonio
Easter Island
Maipo River
PACIFIC OCEAN
3,512 KM TO THE CHILEAN COAST
Rapel River Rapel Lake
Rancagua MARCHIGüE
Pichilemu
EL ARCANGEL ESTATE
San Fernando Santa Cruz
APALTA LA FINCA DE APALTA ESTATE
Tinguiririca River
CHIMBARONGO Mataquito River
CHIMBARONGO WINERY
Claro River
Constitución
Maule River
Teno River Lontué River
Talca
Linares Parral Longaví River
Itata River
Chillán Concepción
ANDES MOUNTAINS
Curicó
Bío Bío River
0
10 20 30 40 50 KM
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C
A
Pichilemu
C
El Arcangel Estate Marchigüe
H
AP
Tinguiririca River
OA
LV ALL
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EY
La Finca de Apalta Estate
CO
San Fernando
EY LCH AG UA VA LL
IGH WAY
Santa Cruz
Paredones
MER ICA
Lolol
PAN A
Chimbarongo Winery Lake Vichuquen
Mataquito River
NH
Chimbarongo
PACIFIC OCEAN
ANDES MOUNTAINS
chap 3 2015 rp jr.qxp
Hualañe
Teno River
Curicó LE Y VAL CO I R CU
Sagrada Familia
0
10
20
Lontué River
KM
La Finca de Apalta
El Arcángel de Marchigüe
VIÑA ZAPALLAR
Marchigüe, Colchagua Valley 350mm (13.7”) 18º (30º to 12º)
Zapallar Vineyard, Aconcagua Valley 220mm (8.7”)
Daily thermal amplitude
Santa Cruz, Colchagua Valley 750mm (29.5”) 15º (30º to 15º)
Degree days*
1,650
1,500
1,049
Altitude, above sea level
400m (1312ft) rising to 500m (1640ft)
200m (656ft)
120m (393 ft) rising to 150 m (492ft)
Denomination of Origin Annual rainfall
9.3° (21.3° to 12°)
Hectares Cabernet Sauvignon Carmenère Merlot Syrah Pinot Noir Malbec Cabernet Franc Petit Verdot Mourvèdre Carignan Grenache Viognier Tannat Tempranillo Chardonnay Sauvignon Blanc Total
Total 60 30 20 -
30
140
300 80 50 60 40 5 5 20 560
30
4 30 8 13 55
360 110 50 84 30 70 5 5 28 13 755
*Degree days are a measure of the number of hours that the temperature reaches 10º C or more. They are measured between September 1st until harvest time (end of April). A vineyard at 10º C or more will develop and mature well. Temperatures of less than 10º C may delay development.
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CARMENÈRE - THE FORGOTTEN GRAPE Much of what emerged from the pre-1990s time warp that was Chile’s wine industry has been consigned to history proper. Something that emerged to restitution, however, was a long-‘lost’ grape variety, Carmenère. In the nineteenth century, Carmenère was one of the constituent grape varieties in the Médoc blend, along with Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc. As such, it was brought over to Chile by the mid-nineteenth-century pioneers. After phylloxera, the grape disappeared in Bordeaux, because when grafted its yields were too low. Carmenère days as a prominent Bordeaux grape were over and it is virtually absent there now. Carmenère became forgotten in Bordeaux. Chile adopted the Bordeaux habit of growing different grape varieties in the same vineyard, and over time Carmenère became forgotten there too. Carmenère’s cover was broken in the early 1990s. The government-backed institute Fundación Chile, which funds research on the country’s natural resources, including wine, decided to employ the services of a French ampelographer to assess the quality of the country’s vineyard stock. The conclusion was that much of what was considered Merlot was in fact Carmenère, long faded in the wine lexicon. For those who saw the Carmenère revelation as an immediate opportunity, the answer was to start bottling 100 per cent Carmenères. Here, after all, was a grape variety that Chile could call its own (although Carmenère is grown in limited quantities in northern Italy). Here was an identity. Other producers were more cautious. Carmenère is a soft, low-acid wine, lacking in pigment, with a distinctive vegetal, spicy taste. When ripened under the Chilean sun and well vinified, it produces a succulent mouthful. But it needs judicious blending to give it structure and colour, and the lack of acidity probably means bottles of Carmenère will never be destined for long ageing. Given the demonstrations of success by other grape varieties in Chile, opinion remains divided about whether Carmenère has the all-round character to be the ‘signature’ variety of Chile, and moreover whether the country actually needs one. More recently, a further 200 adjoining hectares were bought and now a total of 135 hectares are under vines. The remaining 565 hectares – even with Aurelio’s ambition – remains unplantable. At 45° and more, the upper slopes of La Finca de Apalta are as steep as it is humanly possible to cultivate anything commercially without terracing. Even if they attempted to plant higher up the slopes, clearing it any further would be prohibited by the Chilean national forestry agency, CONAF. The hills behind the vineyards are a protected haven of biodiversity, habitat of more than 100 tree, shrub and flower species, many found only in Chile, through which a walkers’ botanical trail now leads.
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Horse power, readily at hand in Chile’s equine rural culture, is the best means of dragging away large stones that emerge from the soils of upper Apalta. Horses’ other role in winter is grass grazing, in which they are joined by decorous alpacas (opposite), that also add characteristically Andean zoological interest
La Finca de Apalta is broadly made up of two contrasting soil types. The flatter part is clay-like, with a water table high enough – unusually in Chile – for no summer irrigation to be required at all. On the steep slopes, the soil is usefully poor and well drained, comprising a top layer of reddish clay and sand (similar to the terra rossa of Barossa in Australia), under which lies 3 to 4 metres of granitic soil, and beneath that, rock. After the winter, a little spring water seeps out of the mountain, but after that the slopes would revert to dust without irrigation. Growing grapes in this territory is pure artefact. Terracing of the steep slopes in the upper part of Apalta was initially ruled out on the grounds of cost and concerns that digging up and disturbing the soils would damage their qualities, but in recent years some experimental terraces have been built as a means of planting even higher into the hillside. In the early years, erosion of the steep slopes after winter rains was a problem, but allowing grass to grow between the rows of vines and the natural anchorage of the growing roots has solved this. The staple red Bordeaux varieties Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, as well as Carmenère, were the obvious choice for the first planting at Apalta. So too was a high density of planting – to reduce plant vigour – of precisely 6,667 vines per hectare (compared to a Chilean norm of around 3,700). Colchagua is not without its growers who believe they can achieve results with white grapes and Montes trialled some hectares of Sauvignon Blanc in the beginning. ‘Sauvignon Blanc is a grape that, for some reason, Chilean oenologists consider more of a challenge than other white varieties. But given the warmth of Apalta, the acidity levels were too low. Our results with it were poor. Red grapes only belong to Apalta,’ said Douglas. 59
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But looking up at the newly cleared bare slopes and soils, Aurelio thought of another granite hillside, thousands of kilometres away on the other side of the world: Hermitage on the northern Rhône, whose Syrah produces some of France’s greatest wines. It occurred to him that the variety was worth trying on the steepest upper slopes. His reasoning was instinctive and simple: the grape was in fashion worldwide, the Australians had done well with it, and the terroir of the slopes of Apalta seemed right. ‘Why not give it a go?’ said Aurelio to his partners. Other producers considered it utter madness to plant an untried grape variety on virgin land. But applying their faith in the expertise of their colleague, and in a manner that defines the Montes spirit, his partners said: ‘Fine. We trust your instinct. Go ahead.’ Up until 1993, Syrah was virtually non-existent in Chile. Ever mindful of the devastating effect that the phylloxera louse could have on its wine industry, Chile guards its isolation with stringent quarantine rules. If you want to introduce new vines, you have to be patient. Two years’ isolation is necessary for any plant introduced into the country. To import new grape varieties, you have to source them from government-approved nurseries in France, California, Australia or South Africa which develop pure, virus-free clones. Aurelio was part-owner of one of Chile’s few nurseries authorized to develop cuttings under tightly controlled, sterile conditions. In their first shipment of Syrah cuttings from France, eggs of red spider mite, one of the relatively few vineyard pests in Chile, were detected. The whole consignment of 5,000 plants had to be incinerated, uninsured. It was a disaster; but second time round they were successful. Before such new plant stocks were imported, the country’s vines were all direct descendants of those brought from Europe in the 1850s. ‘They had their own genetic problems and viruses. It was a useful range of vines, but we badly needed some varietal fresh air. We have been working hard on improving the strains,’ says Aurelio. Newly laid irrigation pipes and young vines on the uppermost slopes of Apalta
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Seasonal colour in lower Apalta
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In 2007 Aurelio asked world-renowned terroir consultant Pedro Parra to investigate the soils of Apalta and Marchigüe, with a view to exploiting the vineyards further to yield more of the better-quality wines. His recommendations and the experience of Aurelio and his team have resulted in some replanting at Apalta. ‘The complete nature of the Apalta terroir has been revealed,’ says Aurelio. ‘Some spots were too stony. In others the water table was too close. There were spots not performing well, so we have been regrafting and grubbing out about 15 per cent of the vineyard.’ There is now greater varietal diversity, reflecting Apalta’s quite complex geology, with some Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon vines now replaced by more Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Syrah and Malbec. Higher up on the slopes Grenache, Mourvèdre and Carignan are planted at very high density, trained in a water-efficient Rhône goblet style, and a blend of the three is bottled under the Outer Limits label.
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Apalta has a microclimate of its own that Aurelio considers produces distinct finesse in the wines. To begin with, it faces south-west, counter to the norm in the southern hemisphere, where vineyards tend to face north to maximize exposure to the sun. A look across the broad Colchagua Valley to the ochre-coloured Loma Grande indicates what a difference the direction of orientation makes. Shielded by Divisadero and the Pangalillo hills, the morning sun hits the vineyards of Apalta later than it does on the valley floor and sunset is an hour earlier, so reducing the hours of exposure to the vine burning sun. Even so, climate change in recent years has affected the vineyards; Cabernet vines were suffering from sunburn in increasingly warm summers. ‘In the past no-one was concerned about this, but we now remove sunburnt clusters, as One of a pair of English Victorian they add a raisiny flavour to the wine and its colour is affected,’ comments Rodrigo traction engines Barría, Montes’ chief agronomist. Montes has designed a canopy management technique kept at Apalta (of of their own that has helped shade the grapes and alleviate the problem, as well as save a type commonly used for power in precious water. Chile till the The prevailing wind in Chile is a southerly that blows gently up the face of Apalta’s 1950s) found by slopes. A fortuitous break in the Cordillera de la Costa further down the valley gives Alfredo in old sawmills of the daytime sea breezes a clear run up the valley from the coast 60 kilometres away. This Chilean lake further tempers the high summer heat, prolonging the ripening period of the vines and district, and still increasing the ripeness of the grape tannins. The broad Tinguiririca river, no more than in working order a quarter of mile away, exerts a strong influence too. In winter, when in spate with Andean snow melt, humidity is higher and this is blown into the vineyards, reducing the likelihood of frost to almost nil. In 1993, what is now Montes’ La Finca de Apalta was an unheard-of, scrubby hillside, on the lower slopes of which the previous owner (a local hardware store proprietor) grew a pear orchard. Since then, thanks to Montes and other wine producers who have subsequently bought and planted there, the whole area of Apalta has gained international fame and is one of the most talked-about red-winegrowing corners of Chile. Its value has multiplied one-hundred-fold since the original US$1,200-per-hectare price tag. Within a short space of time, the vines that Montes planted at Apalta were producing fruit of a quality so good that Aurelio was able to produce what are now two of Chile’s so-called ‘icon’ wines, beginning with the Bordeaux-blend Alpha M in 1996 and the outstanding Syrah Folly in 2000. Apalta has proved itself as a world-class winegrowing area, yet ironically it is still not recognized in Chile’s denomination of origin system. Wines produced from Apalta grapes still can only carry the DO Santa Cruz or Colchagua appellations, which do not count for much. Douglas hoped that Apalta would get the DO of its own that it deserved, or even two given the terroir differences between the upper and lower slopes. But under the current system, Chilean DOs are determined by municipalities, not vineyards. As the region’s human population comprises only a couple of hamlets, it could be a while before ‘DO Apalta’ is seen on a label.
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The colonial-style guesthouse at Marchigüe
EL ARCÁNGEL DE MARCHIGÜE, COLCHAGUA VALLEY If Apalta was a bold vertical move onto the hillside (and one that precipitated a Chilean ‘slope-rush’ among other producers), then Montes’ next land acquisition in 2001 was a longitudinal shift on the map into frontier land. Montes headed 50 kilometres west, beyond Colchagua’s fertile central plains to where its hillsides recede and the valley widens out into a totally different ecology. This is Marchigüe, a weirdly open, wide, rolling landscape – the name means both the place of wind and of witches in Mapuche. Beyond lies nothing between the Pacific Ocean 25 kilometres away except a small, unexpected range of coastal hills. The landscape feels very different to Apalta. In the rain shadow of the coastal hills, it is exceedingly dry, with only 350mm of rain falling during the year, compared to Apalta’s 750. Acacia trees and large-limbed cacti dot the empty landscape of dry grassland. It looks more like Africa than an extension of fertile Colchagua. This does not feel like wine country and yet land values here have risen ten-fold since Montes snapped up land in 2001 (‘It was worth next to nothing,’ commented Alfredo). By that time, Montes’ continued sales growth required further vineyard acquisition, and Aurelio’s consultancy work offered him a glimpse of Marchigüe’s potential. He had been asked to help plant vineyards in the area for a
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Vine planting on a confident scale at Marchigüe
landowning Chilean senator. The first grapes were so good that Aurelio wanted to buy land in Marchigüe wholesale. ‘We collected a huge amount of satellite data that told us a lot about a site, the soils, the fertility and variations in temperature,’ says Aurelio. ‘But in the end, despite all this data, it’s all about intuition when you decide to buy land for planting a vineyard.’ Aurelio was attracted by the undulating slopes and cooler conditions of Marchigüe, whose microclimate is affected by its close proximity to the sea and consequent strong coastal breezes. Unlike other Chilean producers who have gone south in search of cooler conditions, he preferred the idea of going west. In Marchigüe you have cooler conditions, but none of the problems of rot associated with Chile’s wetter southern vineyards, wind being the best fungicide. Not wanting to over-stretch themselves, Montes invited Veramonte winery to join them in the purchase of this land. Agustín Huneeus (owner of Veramonte), a prominent Chilean viticulturalist (who ran Viña Concha y Toro for many years and then owned Quintessa vineyard in California), was by then a minor shareholder in and director of Montes. It was perhaps fear of the unknown that led Huneeus to pull out of the idea, and in the end another backer stepped in, José Antonio Garcés, who later joined the Montes board. Montes now owns a substantial 800-hectare estate in Marchigüe that they named ‘El Arcángel’, 486 of which are under vines. Precipitation in Marchigüe is too low for any form of farming other than of sheep, and now – with judicious irrigation – vines. But finding the water was a problem. The Tinguiririca river is no longer a companion water supply in Marchigüe, it having veered
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Views of Marchigüe
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‘ We have a saying in Chile, ponerse la camiseta, which literally means “wearing one’s shirt”. Employees who have their company shirts on love their work and this enthusiasm pushes the company forward, regardless of its financial situation. Montes has this gift and to help preserve it and our original philosophy of always searching for excellence, I have given myself the title of “Guardian of the Spirit”.’ Douglas
off north to drain into Lake Rapel 30 kilometres away, in Cachapoal. In Marchigüe’s semi-desert conditions, water sourcing and retention are even more critical than at Apalta. Five wells, 100 metres deep have now been sunk at Marchigüe to provide enough water for irrigation needs. This collects in five artificial lakes, one of which forms the picturesque focal point of the El Arcángel estate and doubles up as the course for an annual company aquatics sports day for staff from Santiago, the fincas of Apalta and Marchigüe, and the winery at Chimbarongo. From the veranda of the False start? Water sports on the lake at Marchigüe waterside guesthouse, views across the main lake of acacia trees half-submerged in water and large cacti growing among the vines add to the strangeness of the place, giving it the surrealism of a Salvador Dalí landscape. It’s a measure of the government’s commitment to water conservation that CORFO, Chile’s economic development agency, is helping research into water retention at Marchigüe for Montes to the tune of 50 per cent of the funding. This might result in adopting covers for the reservoirs, which would prevent the annual evaporation of a staggering 160 million litres of water, a saving enough to irrigate an additional 40 to 50 hectares of vineyard. Furthermore, Aurelio believes that the government should do much more to utilize the bounteous supply of water that descends from the Andes and flows into the Pacific Ocean, 90 per cent of which is untapped.
The special glacial moraine soil at Marchigüe
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Planning the original planting and irrigation of this unknown terrain was made easier by enlisting the help of soil specialists from the University of Talca, a renowned centre of oenology in the Maule Valley, 100 kilometres south of Marchigüe. They painstakingly mapped out the entire estate and produced a chart of the different soil types shown by water-holding capacity. Aurelio’s instinct for the suitability of the land was combined with this data. Decisions were then made about where to plant different grape varieties and their precise degree of irrigation, which varies, depending on rainfall, from once a week for some blocks of vines, to once in the season for others, under the dry-farming regime. More recently, terroir consultant Pedro Parra refined the soil map of Marchigüe and in doing so made extraordinary soil discoveries. In particular, one area of 20 hectares out of the estate’s 800 was to prove geologically fascinating and vinously brilliant. What was curious about this location was that excavations revealed the soil to be alluvial, river derived, in a location where there is not, and never has been, a river. Unexpectedly vast quantities of rounded stones create a subterranean labyrinth in a soil of decomposing granite and clay, that is unique. The origin was to be found way back in time, in glaciated Chile. The location was the end-point of a coastal range glacier that aeons ago deposited its moraine debris of large stones, and to which the Cabernet Sauvignon vines of today have adapted in an extraordinary way, its roots delving deep and needing no irrigation at all. In these conditions, the vines suffer extreme stress, but the gain is a diminished crop of small-sized grapes packed with flavour, producing wine of great structure and acidity, deserving a bottling of their own: the super-icon wine, Taita. Being coastal, there is less day/night temperature fluctuation at Marchigüe than there is at Apalta. All things being equal, this might suggest generally inferior grapes. But climatically Marchigüe has its own quality factor: the continuous dry wind. Across the whole estate, this stunts vine growth, causing them to produce low yields of grapes with thicker, protective skins. The resulting wines, especially the Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, are well structured, powerful and deep coloured. The higher proportion of clay than at Apalta results, according to Aurelio, in the Marchigüe wines being the more ‘muscular’. ‘Apalta is the elegance, with candles and long dress. Marchigüe is the Schwarzenegger,’ he says.
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VINEYARD
MANAGEMENT AND DRY FARMING
Until recently Chilean wine producers had the Montes’ sustainability mantra significant advantage of relatively low labour costs, received high commendation compared to their competitors in Old and other and confirmation from the more developed New World countries. Manual Swiss-based Institute for vineyard maintenance and harvesting was very Marketecology in 2015. The affordable. But as the economy of Chile has grown company was certified ‘Fair for Life’ by the (she joined the Organisation for Economic Cointernational body, which inspects and operation and Development rich nations’ club in certifies organizations aiming for the highest 2010) so have average per capita incomes, rising over environmental, employment, social and the past years by several hundred per cent to around commercial standards. $23,000. The advantage of low labour costs may not be as great as it once was, but full-scale manual vineyard husbandry is still commercially viable for larger estates. Montes vineyards are entirely manually worked and harvested, with no mechanization. (And in any case, at Apalta the steepness of the upper slopes rules out mechanization, ‘or anyone but acrobats,’ Douglas used to say.) In its drive for quality, Montes has reintroduced old vineyard management structures while maintaining a progressive and experimental viticultural philosophy. The vineyards of La Finca de Apalta and El Arcángel de Marchigüe are manned by a combined, permanent workforce of 150, swelling with local pickers at harvest time. Under the old system used, each vineyard is administratively divided into parcels of 8 to 10 hectares. As Aurelio puts it, the ‘wisest men’ are given one of these parcels each, with sole responsibility for its performance over the vine-growing year. The parcel manager has a group of vineyard staff under him and he operates quite independently of the overall vineyard managers. At the end of each harvest, he receives a bonus depending on how well his parcel delivers, but only in terms of overall vine health and grape quality. It would not be true to say that each parcel manager is paid more the lower the yield, but introducing this system helped change the mentality of rewarding high yields and instils a strong sense of pride in the resulting fruit quality. Conservation of water has been part of the mantra in the Montes vineyards since 2009, when the company declared that their vineyards would be sustainably managed. Water and energy conservation are at the core. Climate change-induced water scarcity is a global issue and low rainfall in central Chile over recent years has brought the issue to the top of the agenda – the prospect of long-term drought is causing alarm among wine producers. Vine training to reduce plant ‘perspiration’, the use of cover crops and wood shavings on the ground all helped to reduce the water bill, but further ways of tackling the problem were needed. In 2010, researchers at
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A water saving of 13 per cent is achieved by canopy reduction, on the right, in these dry-farmed vines. Wood bark chips piled up around the base of vines also prevent water loss to a similar degree
Montes began looking at how varieties in different vineyard locations reacted to varying levels of irrigation and severe water deprivation. ‘I wanted the vines to know hell before proceeding,’ says Aurelio. This has resulted in a paradigm-shifting ‘dry-farming’ regime that no other producers have developed, but which many will probably need to follow given how serious an issue water is in Chile. In essence, dry farming means irrigation is only practised if rainfall does not meet the vines’ predetermined minimum water needs. Although simple
ITATA - BACK
TO
CHILE’S ROOTS
Some of Chile’s first colonial vineyards were planted in the Itata Valley, close by the old city of Concepción, twice as far south from Santiago as Colchagua, and twice as rainy. This cool southern zone is being rediscovered for its old bush vines and rustic methods; poor growers of small parcels now benefit from rising prices, as Itata emerges from relative obscurity. Decades-old Cinsault – in France the invisible, fourth most planted and generally blended variety – grows well here on deep red, quartz-rich, granitic soils. With 15 per cent Mourvèdre, Montes makes a lighter-style, fragrant red, bottled suitably under the Outer Limits label.
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Tending vines on the Finca de Apalta estate
sounding, the research and analysis required was lengthy and painstaking, but the results have been impressive: Montes’ saves a staggering 840 million litres per year across their estates (65 per cent), equivalent to the annual water needs of 20,000 people. Dry-farmed vines appear rather etiolated and less vigorous, with smaller grape clusters and yields down by 40 per cent. But quality has gone up, with wines showing extra finesse, depth and ageing potential. Montes employs an agronomist, Roberto Pizarro, to oversee both Marchigüe and Apalta vineyards and look after the purely technical aspects of vineyard management. The vineyard year starts in April, with meetings and planning on general viticultural policy, such as the degree of pruning and the numbers of grape clusters per shoot. Every week throughout the year, Aurelio visits both vineyards, or ‘farms’ as he calls them, and has weekly meetings with the parcel managers and the agronomists to monitor the vineyards’ progress. ‘In the summertime, I eat the grapes like a bird,’ he says. ‘We have used different vine-training systems in the past, partly following fashion. We now use the traditional, double Guyot system, typical of Bordeaux, for all varieties and have had to adapt it to counteract the effects of climate change.’ During the summer, bunches of grapes are removed (a ‘green harvest’) in order to keep the final yields down; this combined with parsimonious irrigation results in some very low yields from Apalta and Marchigüe, varying from as little as 2 tons per hectare to a maximum of 8 tons.
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A FOOTPRINT
ON
EARTH
There will still be more to learn from these relatively young vineyards and Aurelio’s philosophy remains one of continual experimentation and discovery. Each year, trials are conducted on individual parcels of vines; grapes from each are vinified separately to see what effect variations in the area of leaf canopy, yields and irrigation have on different varieties. Despite Montes’ spread of vineyards, the search for new sites carries on. Yet Aurelio never claims to be the absolute first to plant vines in a particular spot. ‘There is always a sign,’ he says. ‘It could be as simple as the pergola on a worker’s house. Or the memories of local folk of a vineyard long gone, which once produced good grapes.’ Of Chile’s future vineyard potential, Aurelio says there are two directions to explore: towards the ocean and towards the Andean foothills. Zapallar and Leyda are the ocean route Montes has taken, and Aurelio believes both hills and coast have more wonderful soils and climates to explore: two different opportunities offering further challenges.
ARGENTINA It may have raised the odd eyebrow among their fellow countrymen when Montes, with their emblematic pride in Chile, announced that they were going to make wine in old rival neighbour Argentina, on the other side of the Cordillera. Yet in 2002, riding high on the success of their Chilean operation, Montes took the step of leasing vineyards and a winery in Mendoza, Argentina’s wine capital in the eastern foothills of the Andes. Aurelio’s insatiable curiosity and energy as a winemaker, Douglas’s commercial savvy, and instrumental negotiation by General Manager Andrés Turner made it hapen. Aurelio knew the region’s potential to produce outstanding wine, especially Malbec, and Douglas figured that a move into Argentina would consolidate Montes’ position in an increasingly competitive market for South American wines. They landed on Kaiken as the brand of their new operation, named after a hardy Patagonian goose that crosses, like they did, from one country to the other. The Kaiken operation, centred around the winery at Vistalba bought in 2007, has been run since 2011 by Aurelio’s winemaker son Aurelio Jr, who like his father learnt his winemaking at Chile’s Catholic University. He joined at Montes after stints at Rosemount and Cape Mentelle in Australia, the Franciscan Estate in California, and at Viña Ventisquero in Chile. Running a winemaking business in Argentina is not always easy. The country’s stifling bureaucracy and severe economic problems mean supplies for the winery often run short. But it has given Aurelio Jr in a Kaiken calicata, an Aurelio Jr the space and independence to follow in his inspection trench dug for soil study father’s footsteps as an experimenter and innovator.
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Argentinians have been making wine for as long as Chileans have, and with a much broader palette of grape varieties at their disposal, reflecting the diverse homelands of the country’s Italian, French and Spanish immigrants. One variety in particular, Malbec, has excelled above all others, to the extent that for wine lovers the variety is synonymous with quality wine from Argentina. Malbec’s Andean success is probably thanks to a fortuitous choice of original clone; one that flourished in its new South American home and left its parentage in south-west France in relative obscurity. To get the big picture of the different landscapes of central Chile and Mendoza, the best way is to cross the Andes; by road, not air. The seemingly impossible drive up and over the Himalayan Andes is a journey of daunting road engineering and staggering scenic grandeur. (For some visitors to the Kaiken winery, the car journey is the best bit.) On the Chilean side, the highway climbs straight up into the Cordillera, contorting snakelike in a dizzying succession of hairpin bends. Snorting juggernauts heave their cargoes nose to tail through the ever-thinning air, until the road reaches the Cristo Redentor pass and frontier at 3,175 metres. From here the road into Argentina could not be more of a contrast: the mountains seem a different colour; the landscape is huge; the sky clear and the air dry. You can almost freewheel the whole way down to Mendoza, a gentle threehour incline from the border. Lying in the rain shadow of the Andes, Mendoza is an oasis city in a vast desert steppe, where rainfall is just over 220mm a year. But highly engineered and efficient irrigation systems dating from pre-colonial times provide life-giving water to Mendoza’s surrounding vineyards and olive groves. It is a better-developed system than Chile’s, much of whose share of the plentiful Andean snow melt drains from mountain to sea, gushing through her valleys unharnessed. Water piped from a series of high-altitude reservoirs is plentiful in Mendoza, but demand from agriculture has increased in recent years to the point where supply is becoming a problem and the adoption of dry farming, as practised by Montes in Chile, is being researched at Kaiken.
Biodynamically maintained old, parral-trained, pergola vines
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Morning at Vistalba. Old vineyards in the Mendoza area have been uprooted and the land sold for development, as prices have risen significantly around the city
Conditions for growing grapes in and around Mendoza are very different to those in central Chile, the prime difference being altitude. At nearly 600 metres higher than Apalta, the ultraviolet light is stronger, the air drier and day/night temperature changes more pronounced. There’s also capricious summer rain that falls in concentrated bursts. ‘After my first few rainy visits, I was almost depressed and didn’t want to come back again,’ says Aurelio. ‘But actually, the climate is so dry and windy that rain evaporates almost immediately and poses no threat.’ Under these conditions the grapes’ ripening time is much longer than in other winegrowing regions (90 to 100 days, compared to 60 to 70 in Bordeaux); you can wait for complete ripeness without fear of rot. The only major climatic fear is of hail: golf-ball-sized stones can strike at any time, and do serious damage to vineyards, which are protected with netting. The threat from vine pests is minimal in these dry conditions, and although there is phylloxera in Argentina, for some unknown reason it is fairly benign and new vineyards can be planted ungrafted. Aurelio Jr operates the Vistalba vineyard according to biodynamic principles, the quasi-spiritual method that views the vineyard and its ecology as one single, interconnected living system. Although nearly twice as expensive as orthodox viticulture, he considers biodynamics worth it, as the environment is better, his staff happier, the wildlife more abundant, and the vines healthier. ‘Working along biodynamic principles in the vineyard makes what you do more human,’ he says. ‘You can be 100 per cent certified
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organic and still work like a computer. Nothing works at first – it takes five years to kick in. We use preparations based on virgin deer stomach in the vineyard. I have no idea how it works, but it does. We’ve just introduced two ostriches into the vineyard to encourage biodiversity.’ Is the wine any better? ‘Not yet!’ says Aurelio Jr. Altitude is considered such an important quality factor in Mendoza that vineyards’ reputations hang on it – the higher the better. Vines grown at higher, cooler altitudes with large day/night temperature changes produce grapes with naturally higher acidity and thicker skins, producing fresher, more succulent wines, with great depth of colour and structure. ‘In Chile, much is made of the coastal influence whereas in Argentina all you really have is altitude,’ says Aurelio. Differences in the alluvial soils also contribute to the quality of different vineyards; the higher tend to have rocky soils and the lower ones are more clay-like. Chilean terroir consultant Pedro Parra believes that Argentine producers have much to learn about the potential diversity of their terroirs: ‘In Mendoza, the vineyards appear similar at the macro level, but at the micro level there is significant variation in terroir, with spots that the best producers find and exploit. Some of the most expensive wines are based on Cabernet Sauvignon, not Malbec, because top producers have found terroirs here in which the variety performs better than Malbec, against perceived wisdom.’ As Aurelio Jr puts it: ‘Argentina can be difficult. You need to find the right places for different varieties. Except for Malbec, which likes it everywhere in Argentina. Some varieties just don’t work in Mendoza. Syrah, for example.’ The two big challenges facing Montes when they arrived were acceptance by the Argentines, and adapting winemaking methods to the Argentine terroir. When Aurelio arrived he had little to go on except the help and goodwill of other winemakers; through extensive networking the best vineyard spots around Mendoza were identified and relationships struck up with growers. Likewise, Argentina’s laid-back business attitude still takes some getting used to by the more formal Chileans. Business deals are sealed with a handshake, and after 15 years efforts to draw up written contracts with suppliers have got nowhere. Montes now buys grapes from nearly 50 growers, all found through personal contacts, rather than brokers as would be the norm in Chile. What’s more, grape prices are agreed only after the grape harvest. As well as buying in grapes, Montes now owns vineyards in Mendoza’s top areas: Uco Valley, Vistalba and Agrelo, with plantings of Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Syrah and Bonarda, Argentina’s most widely planted Italian red grape variety. At different altitudes, each vineyard produces wines with complementary characteristics for the final blended wines. At 1,700 metres, the vines in the Uco Valley suffer from the effects of altitude and the extremes of climate, and on poor soils produce small thick-skinned grapes that provide wines of structure and concentration. Agrelo at 900 metres produces floral, fragrant wines, while Vistalba at 800 metres basks in a long growing season and provides wines with soft tannins and elegance. ‘We’ve been testing new varieties from new places,’ says Aurelio Jr. ‘There’s simply no more space around the Vistalba winery because of encroaching property development from Mendoza. For instance, I’m looking at Cabernet Sauvignon and Tannat from Salta for the future, because it’s excellent.’
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The Kaiken vineyards at Vistalba, against a backdrop of the Andean Cordillera, including Mt Aconcagua, the Andes’ highest mountain
After some time spent searching for the right quality, white wines now feature on Kaiken’s list. High, cold, Gualtallary in Tupungato, with its poor, marine calcareous soils is the source of excellent Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. Torrontes, Argentina’s own fragrant white grape comes from sleepy Cafayate in Salta, 1,200 kilometres north of Mendoza and 1,680 metres above sea level. ‘You have to go to Salta for Torrontes,’ says Aurelio Jr. ‘It’s the only place in Argentina. Torrontes from Mendoza if often overripe, sweet and frankly boring. Cafayate is a slow-paced, special place, and somehow that’s reflected in the wines.’ Experimenting further, trial fermentations of Pinot Grigio are also being carried out. In its Kaiken operations Montes has reacquainted itself with some viticultural practices abandoned by quality producers in Chile. They inherited a 100-year-old, very low-yielding Malbec vineyard, trained in the parral pergola-style, now considered inferior in Chile, but which in the terroir of Vistalba produces wine of icon standard, bottled under the Mai label.
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URELIO’S long career as a winemaker has been characterized by a restless drive to experiment and observe; to take nothing for granted and to question conventional winemaking practices. The significant contribution he has made to Chilean wine’s advances stem from his own evidence-based accumulation of knowledge, his own rolling thesis. This also applies to his lesser-known skills in the kitchen. ‘Even when I am cooking at home, making stew or broth, as a principle I never follow recipes. I do it my way,’ he says. His view, after more than 40 years of winemaking, is that ‘normally, all winemaking trends are, frankly, rubbish. All you need are good grapes and care in the way you do things. I hate to follow trends.’
A
From the vineyard to the winery, the variables and dynamics of the processes of winemaking are studied in almost obsessive detail. Nothing has changed in Aurelio’s outlook since the statement he made for the first edition of this book: ‘Tomorrow, I will be tasting more than 40 different wines made from different parcels of vines at Apalta, analysing the effects of cold and hot maceration, and severe green harvesting versus high yields. We go down to the level of numbers of bunches of grapes per linear metre, and per hectare by each parcel of vines and how this affects the quality of the resultant wine. Others do things blindly. At Montes, we are more of a scientific team. I think we are an exception in that way.’ Montes son and father
Aurelio’s team now comprises three assistant winemakers, microbiologists and computer technicians, all of whom are graduates of the leading Catholic University. ‘We receive many visitors and students every year. We talent-spot, and if we like someone, we invite them to come and join us,’ says Aurelio. One of those who made the grade is Aurelio’s eldest son, Aurelio Jr, who after placements with Rosemount and Cape Mentelle in Australia, then Franciscan in California, joined Montes and became winemaker at its Apalta winery, before moving to Mendoza to lead the Kaiken winemaking operation. How different Aurelio’s support is now from the early days of the Montes operation, when he made the first wines virtually single-handed; when he and Douglas had to wait at the local printer’s shop while the ink dried on the first Montes labels. However, the circumstances of the birth of the first Montes wines did mean that a degree of prudence was called for. His first wines were something of a vinous secret kept under wood. Montes, then named Discover Wine, was formally incorporated in November 1988, but the partners had been manoeuvring before then. While still employed by Viña San Pedro,
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AURELIO
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WINERIES
MAKE WINE
This is Aurelio’s formula for making the first Montes red wines, and those today: ‘There is no recipe – it depends on the year. But the hallmark of our wines has always been that we pick the grapes when they are very ripe. In my view, the sin of overripeness is less than the sin of green grapes. A fully ripe grape will have fully ripe tannins, even if over-extracted.’ And on the controversial question of producing wines with less alcohol, in a Decanter magazine interview Aurelio has been forthright: ‘People say they can’t drink wines that are 14% or 15%, but I can’t drink a wine that’s 12% with its harsh, unpleasant tannins. To sacrifice the quality of wine just to put 12% on the label is wrong. This obsession with low alcohol may ruin some winemakers.’ Aurelio’s prescription for making great wine is frustratingly unrevealing: ‘We do not over-process or manipulate the wines. We just leave them in barrel, taste them once a month and rack them a couple of times.’
Aurelio discretely and speculatively produced the 1987 vintage of Cabernet Sauvignon from grapes grown at his own vineyard in Micaela. Using Montes’ start-up capital, he engaged local pickers and vinified the grapes at the Los Nogales bodega, where the Cabernet sat in a combination of 250 new and used French oak barrels, until a demand existed to bottle and label it. ‘Rather like the original Penfolds Grange Hermitage in Australia, which was developed in secret by Max Schubert in the early 1950s,’ said Douglas. After the sum of his experiences at Viñas Undurraga and San Pedro, Aurelio knew what he was doing. For the first wines he had the simple, dual aim of greater concentration and greater fruitiness; expressing the inherent qualities of his old-vine Micaela material. ‘I was making the wine that I wanted to make and that I felt sure the markets would welcome. Everything was there to make very good wine,’ he says.‘We just grabbed it.’ With the help of Pedro Grand’s own workforce, Aurelio took measures that today are taken for granted in Chile, but which at the time were still the exception rather than the rule. The removal of excess grape bunches (a ‘green harvest’) in the early part of the growing season and a reduction in irrigation ensured lower yields and smaller Cabernet berries. Their high skin-to-pulp ratio helped in obtaining good extract. Picking was at optimum ripeness and yields were at the desired
The original Montes Cabernet Sauvignon label
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low level of around 10 tons per hectare. Simple steps were taken such as picking in the cool of the early morning to preserve the freshness of the grapes and packing them in small, 15kilo boxes to prevent damage in transport from field to winery. In the winery, sub-standard bunches of grapes were removed prior to destemming. Cabernet was given extended maceration, before pressing, oak ageing and light filtering. Once bottled and revealed to the wider world, the 1987 Montes Cabernet Sauvignon was something of a revelation that made the critics take notice. English wine writer Hugh Johnson said of it: ‘It is a remarkable wine, combining the sort of cool-climate grassy Cabernet bouquet and flavours you find in, for example, southern Victoria and Tasmania with a most seductive soft smoothness and ample vinosity. It will be fun to see how it develops (if there’s any left!).’
THE ORIGIN
OF THE
ANGEL
With historical echoes of Chile’s nineteenthcentury wine ascendancy, the Belle Époque styling of the Montes Angel also evokes the magical realism of Latin America. Designed for the labels of the first Alpha wines by Douglas’s cousin Claudia Silva, it has since evolved for application to all wines (except Folly) in the hands of designer son-in-law Ignacio Williamson. The Angel now graces all Montes bottles, while Angel statues and figurines, all of them collected or commissioned by Douglas, are present on all Montes premises. But the Angel is far from being the polished product of a branding focus-group. Douglas arrived at the image after a personal journey, one that by extension included the Montes project, that gave him a life-long belief in providence from above. A succession of close calls on his own mortality – ranging from near-fatal diving accidents in his youth, to two horrendous car crashes in later life – convinced Douglas of the existence of angelic intervention, a belief that he held in spite of the last diagnosis of advanced cancer. For those disposed to believe in it, the Angel represents a real guardian spirit behind Montes’ success. For the rest, it is a strong brand, and one that symbolizes a communal spirit among members of the Montes ‘family’.
ALPHA
REDS
If the first Montes wines began in the vineyard, then the flagship Montes Alpha Cabernet was an innovation that started in the winery as a characteristically flexible response to market feedback. Independently, Alex Guarachi in the USA and Martin Wright in Britain (then Montes’ only two importers) converged on the notion of giving the Montes Cabernet extra time in new oak. The inherent high quality of the wine
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meant it was ready to take on the complexities and depth of flavours imparted by extended ageing in new oak barrels. The price-to-quality ratio of such an enriched Cabernet would be irresistible to wine drinkers, Alex and Martin both conjectured. They made suggestions; the response from Santiago was: ‘We are working on something’. What they were working on was leaving the best lots of the Montes 1987 Cabernet wine in new 225-litre French barriques for an additional six months. ‘Buying in the new oak, with our initial capital tied up in the first Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon, was slightly risky, and a great expense for us at the time. But boy, was it worth it!’ said Alfredo. The extra time in oak had a brilliant effect and the result was a wonderfully rich, well-structured wine that perhaps more than any other symbolizes Montes’ achievement and success. In the USA, this new wine began life as Montes ‘Gran Reserva’, an empty epithet in the Chilean context, where the law allows the description Gran Reserva to be applied to any wine, irrespective of age or quality. Instead, at the suggestion of Martin Wright, ‘Alpha’ was added as a prime qualifier to the eponymous Montes, to create a universally pronounceable – and memorable – name. The Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon was the first of a new kind of Chilean wine – dubbed ‘super-premium’ – that traded off its higher cost with a new-found confidence, and above all with style. Internationally, it leveraged Montes into pole position for winning new enthusiasts for what Chile could produce. At its level, it has remained at the top of the game ever since.
The wine that started it all: Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon, sustainably dry farmed since 2012
In 1997, a decade after the first Montes vintage, a panel of judges under the auspices of Britain’s Wine magazine tasted 88 red wines from around the world from the 1987 vintage, including Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon. In the ‘Bordeaux styles’ group, which included Châteaux Mouton-Rothschild, Haut-Brion and Pétrus (to name a few), the Alpha ‘performed better than any other claret except Lynch-Bages’. Even though 1987 was a middling year for Bordeaux, the news came as a vindication for Aurelio and Douglas. It was another significant moment for them. ‘We felt we had passed a test. We had been acknowledged for producing a wine that had the ability to age, along with the best,’ said Douglas. A similar tasting of 1990 wines was conducted in 2000, at which the Alpha Cabernet performed even better than the 1987. Until 1997, Alpha Cabernet was sourced predominantly from Aurelio’s 100-year-old vines of his Micaela vineyard at Curicó (with the 25 per cent allowance of grapes from outside the Curicó region permitted by Chile’s denomination of origin rules). From then on, the source of Cabernet grapes for the Alpha switched from Curicó to Apalta, as its hillside vines came of productive age. The change in origin was made seamlessly and quietly, continuity of the brand overrode origin in the marketing of the wine. But with the varieties at Marchigüe distinguishing themselves, in the future it may be seen as a marketing advantage to highlight any future changes in the vineyard origins, rather than play them down, especially given wine critics like to look for the terroir in wines.
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The cavernous old Apalta barrel store as it stood before its near-complete destruction by the 2010 earthquake, during which scores of barrels were lost. Chile has an abundance of forest, but its own oak is no good for wine (‘Its effect on wine is horrible,’ says Aurelio). So imported French and American 225-litre oak barrels have been a necessary prop for the success of all ambitious Chilean wineries. Aurelio uses only French for the Montes and Kaiken wineries. ‘For the first and second uses, American oak is too aggressive,’ Aurelio says. ‘But after that, it can be fantastic. French oak is milder, and smoother to begin with.’ Montes buys from the top French coopers, such as Taransaud and Saury, and is selective in the source forests, the drying period the oak is given, the degree of toast and the grain of the wood. They also buy from a local cooper, Tonelería Nacional, that imports French oak and assembles barricas in Santiago
Other red grape varieties that over the years have achieved the exacting quality that gains entry to the Alpha club are Merlot, Syrah, Carmenère, Pinot Noir and Malbec, ranked alongside Alpha Cabernet, benefiting from the brand’s solid and pivotal place in the history of Montes. That history took another major turn, with Alpha Cabernet at the forefront again, when Montes put their groundbreaking dry-farming regime into practice. What began as a sustainability-driven precautionary measure against the increasing uncertainty over water supply, and its cost, has in turn produced something of a step change in Montes wines. Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon 2012 was the first vintage of wine produced from dry-farmed grapes. Minimal irrigation produced smaller clusters of concentrated fruit, whose thicker skins required protracted maceration. The result is a wine with greater depth and better balance. ‘We were stupid because we were irrigating too much,’ says Aurelio. ‘We now get wines with more ripe fruit and palate weight that are a lot more receptive to barrel ageing.’ Now all Alpha reds (with the exception of Pinot Noir) are sustainably dry farmed with critically acclaimed results.
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ALPHA M The story of Alpha M begins back in the mid-1990s, when following the success of the Alpha wines, Aurelio was ready for a new challenge. The vines of Apalta were coming on stream and he knew the potential for quality beyond Alpha level lay within its hillside soils. He was also aware that other producers of premium and super-premium wine were also thinking higher thoughts. In the absence of any official quality descriptors in Chile, ‘ultrapremium’ wines were now being planned. (Are there any superlatives left?) Whether it was an expectation-building ploy, a genuine struggle to think of a name, or both, the new venture went under the rather sinister title of Project X. Realizing this would not do for a wine, X turned into M, which incidentally stands for Murray (‘You couldn’t call a Chilean wine “Murray”, for heaven’s sake!’ said Douglas). For Aurelio, the creation of the first M in 1996 was a different task compared to that of Alpha Cabernet; it was back to the vineyard rather than creation in the winery. He knew what he was looking for and was much more experienced. Those parcels of vines on the upper slopes that performed better than others were beginning to distinguish themselves; these areas of Apalta were born and groomed for success, each receiving their own yield limitations and leaf canopy management. M is a typically Bordeaux Médoc blend of Cabernet Sauvignon (80 per cent), Cabernet Franc (10 per cent), Merlot (5 per cent) and Petit Verdot (5 per cent – and sometimes called just Verdot in Chile). Aurelio’s assemblage is not of course the insurance policy against the vagaries of climate that it partly is in Bordeaux. What he adopted is the combination of vines for its complexity. Cabernet Sauvignon provides the strong backbone of structure and tannins; the other varieties fill it in with their own characters: Cabernet Franc with fruit and fragrance, Merlot with softness, and Petit Verdot with a certain spiciness. M is about a combination and a concentration of fruit: for greater concentration a green harvest is carried out before and during the ripening period with resultant low yields of around 4 tons per hectare. After picking and destemming, the grapes pass through a rigorous quality control checkpoint, at which the substandard are individually weeded out by a team of workers. Concentration and nimble fingerwork are needed for the grape-by-grape triage of fruit destined to become Alpha M
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Meticulous attention to detail goes into the presentation, packaging and marketing of all Montes wines, especially M, for which Douglas took the advice of Pierre Beuchet, his former French importer. The taperingly slender bottles are made in Chile and lead capsules come from Spain. Bottles are individually handwrapped in paper before shipment in rauli wood boxes
Once in the crusher, 20 to 30 per cent of the juice is ‘bled’ away to intensify flavours by increasing the proportion of skin to pulp. Selected imported yeasts are generally used for the fermentation, although in some years Aurelio allows the grapes’ natural yeasts to work on their own. ‘Young winemakers are afraid of native yeasts because you tend to have difficult fermentations as a result. But great things in life are difficult to produce. If you want good wine, you have to take risks and you have to work harder. Easy winemaking gives you easy wine,’ he says. After fermentation, a traditional-style long post-fermentation maceration lasts for two to three weeks. The wine then undergoes full malolactic fermentation to lower the acid level and develop further complexities of flavour. Rather than blend straight away, the wine, still divided up according to the original vineyard parcels, is then kept for 18 months in new oak barriques from the Allier region of France. The final piece of artistry behind M is the assemblage, a meticulous blending of up to 20 different wines by Aurelio and his colleagues. This takes place three months before bottling. Aurelio’s aim with M is to produce a ‘balanced and harmonious wine, not a big muscular wine’. Where M differs from comparative Bordeaux wines is its approachability even at a young age of two to three years. How do you make a wine that is ready for drinking when young, yet has the ability to age 20 years? The answer Aurelio gives is ripeness, not just in terms of sugars, but of the grapes’ ‘phenolics’, the chemical compounds that make up the colouring pigments, tannins and flavourings.
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FOLLY Only two years after planting the upper, steepest slopes of Apalta with Syrah in 1998, Aurelio realized that he had something special on his hands. The grapes were full of promise. Aurelio takes up the story: ‘When we planted Syrah I told Douglas, “I think that Syrah will be fantastic”. Then after five years I said, “Douglas, I have made a mistake, the wine is outstanding”.’ The opportunity was clearly there for making something of this. The question of blending arose, but Aurelio was adamant that having discovered a patch of land – a terroir – that went so perfectly with Syrah, it would be criminal to mask it in a blend. They should take it to the market in its pure form. And so (as if by stumbling across it) the idea for Folly was born. Syrah grapes from the lower Apalta slopes go into the Alpha Syrah wine, itself lauded by the critics. Grapes grown in the steepest, highest part of the Apalta vineyards are destined only for Folly. As a wine, Folly could be said to be an exercise in wine concentration; it is almost essence of Syrah, so wonderfully deep is it in colour and rich in long flavours. It is an exercise that begins on the 45° slopes of upper Apalta, where the naturally reduced plant vigour and spare irrigation have, over the years, resulted in witheringly low yields of less than 3 tons per hectare, and now even fewer under dry farming. Berries are smaller than their counterparts on the plain. The harvesting and winemaking process is similar to M: individual berry selection, juice bleeding before fermentation, extended maceration, and 18 months in new French oak before bottling without filtration. It was of course the background to Folly that produced its name: the problems and cost of clearing and planting upper Apalta; the scepticism of others in Chile at the perceived madness of the undertaking; the difficulties of managing and harvesting vineyards on vertiginous inclines; the idea of embarking on a second, ‘icon’ wine after M – and a Syrah at that. The naming of the wine ‘Folly’ seemed like the only rational part of the whole venture.
RALPH STEADMAN
AND THE
FOLLY LABELS
Having created such a sensational wine, what was needed was a label to match it; something that would reflect the spirit of Folly. Ralph Steadman is a renowned British painter and illustrator. His splashy, pen-and-ink caricatures of beaky-nosed wine buffs dipping their nostrils into blood-red wine were the image of the Oddbins British wine stores for more than a decade. He travelled the world’s wine regions extensively as part of the job and also owned a vineyard himself at his home in Kent, England. In 1991, the time came for him and his wife Anna to visit Chile. During that trip he inevitably met Douglas, who detected Steadman’s jadedness at the prospect of being shown yet another collection of new stainless steel tanks. He suggested that they forego the well-trodden visitor path of Chile’s fertile wine country and opt for something unique that Chile had to offer, the absolute antithesis: a trip to the Atacama. Douglas wanted to take the Steadmans and show them his desert. So from Santiago he drove them up Chile’s aorta, the Pan-American Highway,
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through the browning landscape and shortening latitudes to his beloved home town of Antofagasta, thence to the oasis village of San Pedro de Atacama. And back to Santiago: a mere 3,200-kilometre round trip. It was an experience that Ralph talks about in reverential terms. ‘Anna loves deserts, but I don’t. I was afraid,’ he recalls in his studio, one rainy winter’s afternoon. ‘We tore across so-called roads of sharp gravel in the middle of absolutely bloody nowhere. If we had broken down, God knows what would have happened to us. Only a desert man like Douglas could have timed our arrival back in Antofagasta just as all the tyres of the car burst, knowing they would not fail him.’ The hardy people of the Atacama, the strange lunar formations of its landscape and its eerie abandoned mining towns were to prove an unexpected inspiration for the British artist. He suddenly saw in the Atacama ‘great variation, diversion, damage, twisted rocks … things happening’. ‘I could not have been anything but influenced by it, so when I returned to England it blew me away and I sat and drew the paintings,’ he says. The result was 12 beautifully coloured desertscape oils, each executed on handmade linen, which convey both the brutality and the gentle intensity of the desert. ‘The paintings would have sat in my drawer doing nothing unless I had showed them to Douglas during one of his visits, after which he had the idea of using them for Folly,’ says Ralph. ‘It was totally inspired. We could not have done better if we had tried. They convey the intrepid madness of the Spanish who crossed the desert to conquer the country, the same intrepid madness that drove Montes to clear and plant on the steep granite hillside of Apalta and produce Folly. It was such a happy chance that it would never have happened any other way. If they had said to me: “Do you want to draw the desert?”, they would have got a horizon line, sand and blue sky above.’
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Steadman’s desert (above) and Patagonian (opposite) landscapes used for Folly labels
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Ralph criticizes what he sees as the ‘tyranny of Bordeaux’ in the design of wine labels and is delighted that his work has broken a mould. ‘It was as brave to use those labels for a wine as it was for Aurelio to plant on those slopes. The madness of the Folly venture was like inventing a new art form itself,’ says Ralph. The Montes Angel herself was also subjected to Ralph’s cartoonist wit. His fey, funny, tipsy-looking interpretation for the Folly label (called Betty) initially had chicken’s feet. Douglas considered that a sacrilege too far, so Ralph shod her with working-men’s boots for the Folly launch invitation. By the 2005 vintage, all Ralph’s Atacama paintings had been used – but fortunately, his inspiration from Chile did not stop at the northern desert. Ralph’s artistic compass swung southwards, to the peaks, ice and inspiring wilderness of Chilean Patagonia, the intense paintings of which, for the time being, provide a further set of suitably crazed images for Folly.
OUTER LIMITS Decanter’s description of the Outer Limits name as ‘surreal’ probably pleased Aurelio, whose planting and sourcing from vineyards beyond the conventional led Montes to develop the brand. Featuring the solitary figure of Aurelio ranging in ‘terroirs beyond frontiers’, the three red wines are the product of his searching for new viticultural areas and pushing in new directions. From Itata Valley down in the rainy south comes resurrected, old-vine Cinsault, the 2013 vintage of which was an ‘Expert’s Choice’ in Decanter. From coastal Zapallar’s windy, cool vineyards, whose ‘extreme climate for winegrowing has put our winemaking abilities to the test’, a full-bodied but fine-tuned Pinot Noir. And third, from the ‘wild’ slopes of Apalta, a big Carignan, Grenache and Mourvèdre southern-French blend, described by the USA’s Wine Enthusiast as ‘a ballsy red ... Bursting with flavours of poached plums, blueberries and dried figs, with a spicy underpinning’.
PURPLE ANGEL When in 1994 Carmenère made its reappearance in Chile after decades of concealment, many producers jumped on the Carmenère bandwagon, keen to bottle what many were calling a ‘signature’ variety for the country. Aurelio’s approach to the unmasked newcomer in their midst was more circumspect and he was not an immediate subscriber to the single-variety Carmenère fan club. ‘It is a late ripener, and as a result tends to have low acidity and high pH,’ he says. ‘Its flavour can be
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overly vegetal and spicy and the wine it produces has unproven bottle-ageing potential. It needs to ripen fully but not overly so.’ Before he released a Carmenère of his own, Aurelio wanted to spend time getting to grips with the variety and testing its parameters. ‘I kept saying to those people who were practically demanding a Carmenère from me that I would let them know when I had made one that I was happy with,’ he says. He wanted to find the right terroir for the grape and establish the best way to make a varietal Carmenère, before breaking away fully from the variety’s historical role as a supporting grape. The growing American and British fashion for There were big risks in bottling a variety with rosé prompted Montes to create its first pink wine in 2005. Christened Cherub, it is made from unknown consumer appeal, and the markets needed to be slow-ripening Marchigüe Syrah, picked early for approached diplomatically. ‘I was afraid because people acidity, then allowed brief, overnight maceration tasted Carmenère and said they loved it, but then they for colour extraction. Ralph Steadman would choose a different wine,’ says Aurelio. He took cask generously drew the label for a wine that was released with added poignancy. For the cherub samples of Carmenère derived from Curicó, Casablanca, on the label is named after Alfredo, whose health Alto Maipo (near Santiago) and parts of the Colchagua was in decline at the time. The wine was Valley to the USA and other key markets to gauge people’s dedicated to him by his fellow partners; it reaction to different regional styles. In the end, it was the honours both their fraternal bond and the key role Alfredo played in Montes’ success Carmenère from different plots at Marchigüe that gave Aurelio the confidence he needed in the variety; the first The Cherub has recently been joined by his twin, on the labelling of Montes Twins, a blend of full harvest in 2003 was vinified with extremely used Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec that reflects the encouraging results. Marchigüe Carmenère is deep purple, best of both varieties. full flavoured and resonant; the area’s cooler climate suited the later ripening grape and gave the wine that extra acidity and bite that was needed. Coupled in equal measure with his rounder, riper and voluptuous Carmenère from the warmer slopes of Apalta, the result was superb. Although Aurelio could bottle single-estate wines from Marchigüe and Apalta – for all the varieties grown – he still likes the virtues of blending wines from the two areas under the DO Colchagua Valley, as the combination is ‘outstanding’ for him. His finishing touch to the intravarietal blend was the addition of eight per cent Petit Verdot. The percentage of the secondary wine is important. According to Aurelio, if you introduce more than ten per cent of a secondary wine into a blend, the unwanted character of that secondary wine will start to show through too strongly. Petit Verdot is a thick-skinned grape that punches above its weight with what Aurelio describes as ‘wild and aggressive’ flavours; it is a seasoning grape that even in small doses can provide structure, tannins and extra colour. ‘Purple Hope’ was the rather diffident initial idea for the name of the wine that, after a protracted conception, took flight with confidence in 2005 as Purple Angel. Aurelio must now be happy with the wine: the 2011 vintage was included in influential, former Wine Spectator Editor James Suckling’s ‘World’s Best 100 Wines’ list in 2015.
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TAITA How do you improve on M, Purple Angel and Folly, wines of internationally acknowledged ‘grand cru’ stature? Why would you wish to? Douglas Murray is the answer to the latter. In his last years he dreamt of producing a wine that rose above all others, that surpassed everything that Montes had achieved. His el dorado, 100-point wine. The answer to the first question came thanks to a quirk of geology: a glacier from the Cordillera de la Costa range that millennia ago deposited its front-end moraine in an area that is now 20 hectares of stony, labyrinthine soils at Montes’ Marchigüe estate, identified by Aurelio and terroir consultant Pedro Parra. In 2007, Aurelio began vinifying separately the Cabernet Sauvignon growing on this geological discovery, with results so arrestingly good that he was not sure what to do with it. The soil’s decomposing granite and clay nature, and the adaptation of the roots to grow entirely unirrigated and therefore under great stress, produced a wine unlike any other Cabernet from the estate: remarkably structured, rich and concentrated. The name ‘Taita’ was chosen by Douglas in what was to be the last project he worked on before his death in 2010. In Chilean Spanish, taita is a term of respect for a father, or wise elder. The name was chosen because it summed up and captured all the years of experience and accumulated knowledge that led to the evolution of the wine, sub-labelled ‘Wisdom in Wine’. In 2013, after spending two years in barrel and a further three in bottle, the decision to release the first, 2007, vintage was made. It capped the range of icon wines and was added cause to celebrate in the year that was Montes’ 25th anniversary. Just 3,000 bottles are produced of this $300 ‘super-icon’, 85 per cent of which is Cabernet Sauvignon, the other 15 per cent chosen according to vintage quality, and kept a secret by Aurelio. Is the wine that much better than its fellow icons? Time will partly tell. As Robert Parker’s influential Wine Advocate describes Taita: ‘... the new super-mega wine from Montes. I tasted it once with Aurelio and was impressed by its sheer power ... a dark and brooding, concentrated example of a Cabernet-based wine ... It’s full-bodied and intense, and should live a long life in bottle.’
WHITE
WINES
Although Montes, like other Chilean producers, has developed its reputation chiefly by producing red wines, Aurelio’s standing as a winemaker rests on a versatility that has also produced some world-class whites. Aurelio’s Vinexpo gold-medal-winning Sauvignon Blanc produced at Viña San Pedro in 1985 had demonstrated his adeptness at handling white grapes with limited technical resources at his disposal. Its great virtues were that it was a clean, crisp wine showing typical varietal character, the antithesis of Chilean taste at the time, attuned as it was to oxidized, yellow offerings. It was made in epoxy-lined cement vats with unsophisticated temperature control. He was on the right track. An early Montes Sauvignon Blanc was lauded in the UK’s Sunday Times as ‘a breakthrough and a bargain, a beautiful stylish, flinty, grassy-herby Sauvignon with a long Sancerre-like finish’ and medal success continued with the 1990 Montes Sauvignon Blanc winning Aurelio’s second gold at Vinexpo and Montes’ first. A couple of years later, in 1992, Jan Read
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Wine harvest in spring? It makes sense from a northern perspective. In a clever move to bridge the globe’s seasonal polarity, Montes produced a Sauvignon Blanc ‘nouveau’ in 2015. For the vintage to be shipped to northern hemisphere markets for summer drinking, Leyda grapes had to be picked in February (‘Spring’) 60 days earlier than normal. To bring forward fruit maturation, yields were reduced, and leaf canopy removed to maximize grapes’ exposure to sunlight. Vinification on its lees made a fuller-bodied, complex wine. Justin Waples in the UK, one of the first retailers to stock Montes, went into nostalgic reverie over it: ‘The nose alone captures that heady excitement of tasting Chilean wine for the first time nearly 30 years ago. Can it really be that long ago? The wine really does have that buzz’
writing in Decanter described Montes white wines in general as ‘outstanding’, defying the odds in a year in which 40 per cent of Chile’s crop was, unusually, destroyed by frost. There was, however, one Sauvignon-related episode that almost put paid to all the partners’ efforts and jeopardized the entire Montes project. Despite Aurelio’s success with Sauvignon Blanc, and in the flurry of excitement that surrounded the reception of their wines, the firm accepted an offer of winemaking help. In the early 1990s ‘flying winemakers’ were making a name for themselves as hands-on seasonal consultants, imparting technical knowledge to New and Old World producers alike at vintage time. British importers Hedley Wright insisted that Montes ask the successful British flying winemaker Hugh Ryman to lend his capable hand and then bankable name to the 1993 Sauvignon Blanc harvest. The confident expectation was that sales of 40,000 cases would result from the collaboration, so short-term contracts were agreed with grape growers to meet the demand. The winemaker duly arrived for the harvest, but rather than the expected Hugh Ryman, an Australian colleague of his deputized. ‘He made the wine, but then rejected the majority of the tanks,’ says Aurelio. ‘We only managed to sell around 7,000 cases in the end and we had no choice but to sell the rest as bulk wine at a huge loss.’ To make matters worse, the grapes were bought in an expensive year. It was an unmitigated disaster. Creditors were at the door and Montes was literally hours away from bankruptcy. The land at Apalta was even offered to their neighbours, the wine producer Casa Lapostolle. At the last minute, the situation was saved by the rather reluctant acceptance of a new, fifth partner at the boardroom table: an investment fund, Estrella Americana, that injected life-saving capital in return for a stake in the business. Montes’ name needs no support for the range of Sauvignons now produced. The cool conditions of Casablanca produce an expressive, well-balanced wine labelled under the Classic series. Sauvignon from the coastal area of Leyda, first produced in 2005, and now labelled under the Limited Selection label, has made a name for itself as a wine of distinctive quality. And best of all is the lees-aged Sauvignon bottled under the Outer Limits label from coastal Zapallar, planted in 2006, whose cool climate produced a 2014 vintage described by Robert Parker’s influential Wine Advocate as ‘akin to a Sancerre, serious and austere ... a superb Sauvignon Blanc’. It seems that the opinion of many experts, such as the UK’s Steven Spurrier, that Chile’s trump card could be its coastal Sauvignon Blanc, may be being proved right.
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A SPARKLING ANGEL In celebratory mood, Montes launched its first fizz, Sparkling Angel, in 2015, to immediate critical success, picking up a gold medal at the Catad’Or Santiago Wine Awards. Zapallar’s cool, coastal conditions provide Pinot Noir and Chardonnay with the right heightened acidity to make this traditional method, dry sparkling wine. Three years in bottle on its lees, and a predominance of Pinot Noir (70 per cent) produces a silky, elegant wine with fine foam. Three-quarters of the first vintage (9,000 bottles) were shipped straight to Japan. Montes’ other great achievement in white wines has been their Chardonnay. Mirroring the birth of Alpha Cabernet, the first Micaela-derived Chardonnay graduated from a ‘special cuvée’ to Alpha status in 1994, after Aurelio introduced barrel fermentation and oak ageing. Montes Alpha Chardonnay was then sourced from growers in the Casablanca Valley, where the cool conditions and slow ripening produce flavoursome, low yields. Another evolutionary change began with the 2014 vintage, in which grapes from Leyda were combined with those from Casablanca. Leyda’s closer proximity to the sea brings added freshness and minerality to the wine, and the greater proportion of its grapes brings a coastal change in official origin, from DO Colchagua to DO Aconcagua Costa. Alpha Chardonnay remains a wine full of tropical fruit flavours and with a complexity that improves in bottle. Following the current fashion for less oak, now a reduced 40 per cent of the wine is fermented and aged for 12 months in new and used French oak barrels, with weekly stirrings or batonage of the lees to add extra flavours and complexity to the wine; the remaining 60 per cent sees its passage through stainless steel to act as a refreshing counterbalance in the final wine. Careful choice of artificial yeasts from a broad range available from Europe is a must because, for whites, Aurelio never relies on wild yeasts; their numbers are too low in the ‘clean’, pressed juice and incomplete fermentations can result. There is partial malolactic fermentation, enough to create the buttery complexity associated with it, but not so much as to cause an imbalance in overall acidity level. Montes’ Late Harvest dessert wine deserves a glowing mention. Sweet, pudding wines are not products that you immediately associate with Chile. Their output is limited and intermittent because Chile’s vineyards are generally too dry for the development of the necessary agent in their production, botrytis mould. A Brussels ban on the wines – lifted some years ago – is another reason why they are not better known in the European Union at least. But at Curicó, near the Lontué river, damp misty mornings and warm afternoons in the autumn month of May can, in some years, create the right conditions for the kindly form of botrytis that dries out the grapes, producing wines of intense extract and sweetness. Montes Late Harvest is a floral Gewürztraminer from Curicó. The 1996 vintage (then blended with Riesling) surprised many when it scooped a Civart trophy at the Vinexpo of 1997, the exhibition’s highest level of award, given to the best of the gold medal winners.
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RIESLING REVIVAL ‘Chile has never done anything really great with Riesling, and that’s because we have no expertise with the grape. But we need to find a way forward, because people who love Rieslings are big wine lovers.’ So said Aurelio in an interview with the UK’s Drinks Business magazine in 2015. Chilean Riesling producers may have taken offence, but Aurelio believes that to fully understand the grape, and its potential he needed help. The market for Riesling has grown, particularly in the USA, albeit falteringly. So with a Riesling under the Outer Limits label in mind, he invited German consultant Gernot Kollmann to stay in Chile, to produce some experimental cuvées using Leyda grapes. Aurelio got more than he expected when from 20 tons, the German created no fewer than 21 wines of different styles. Judicious decision-making will be needed to choose the right one for the market.
MONTES
WINERIES
Before the construction of the winery at Apalta, Montes had been one of Chile’s foremost wine producers that did not own its own bodegas. Montes was a tenant, with Pedro Grand as their landlord. His contribution in kind to the start-up capital of Montes was the free use of the space, vats, bottling line and manpower of his Los Nogales winery at Curicó. A functional old workhorse bodega of no great architectural beauty, it was of passing historical interest because of its nineteenth-century adobe (mud-brick) walls, that rendered it uninsurable against Chile’s ever-present earthquake threat. But until the construction of Montes’ own winery at Apalta in 2004, Los Nogales was where the majority of Montes wines were made. (In the early days ‘Nogales’ was chosen as the name for some lower-priced wines. These were swiftly renamed ‘Villa Montes’ after someone tactfully pointed out that Los Nogales was the name of a town synonymous with low-life crime.) The deal between Montes and Pedro was that they had free use of his Los Nogales facilities up to what was considered an ambitious ceiling of 300,000 litres (33,333 cases). But sales during the first years of Montes’ life were so buoyant that this ceiling was quickly and unexpectedly surpassed after the third vintage in 1990. A further leasing agreement was drawn up and Montes continued to rent from Pedro. Los Nogales was gradually phased out and has now been replaced altogether by a winery at Chimbarongo, purchased in 2008. Conveniently located near Apalta off Route 5, Chile’s arterial road, in the Colchagua Valley, it now works to its capacity of 23 million litres. Chimbarongo also satisfies Montes’ sustainability aims, employing a microbiological treatment plant that cleans ‘greywater’ (non-sewage domestic waste water) for reuse in irrigation. Montes’ early policy of renting capacity avoided the need for capital-intensive projects. But in 2000, it was decided that an on-site winery should be built at Apalta, dedicated to the production and storage of Alpha M, Folly, Purple Angel and all Alpha Reds. It made practical sense to make these wines in situ rather than truck the grapes to the Curicó winery then used, 50 kilometres away. From an image point of view, Montes’ eminent standing as a producer and the ‘iconic’ status of its top wines required a winery to match, and one that would also cater for the increasing number of tourists in the Colchagua Valley. Montes had made their agricultural mark on Apalta. The time had come to make their architectural one.
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Aurelio ‘pumping over’ fermenting Cabernet Sauvignon at the old Los Nogales winery. The wine benefits from momentary airing before it is piped back to the layer of grape skins at the top of the tank for further extraction of colour and flavours. The approach to pumping over has moved away from a fixed, formulaic approach that produced over-extracted wines which then had to made drinkable by fining with copious use of gelatine and egg whites. ‘We are the winery doing the least mechanical working of the skins and we’re getting the wines we want. The structure, the colouring, the tannins, the mid-palate. We do this by pumping over only when the fermenting must in the tank reaches peak temperature, thus obtaining only sweet tannins, not the harsh ones. Why create the problem in the first place?’ says Aurelio. Aurelio also uses long, temperature-controlled, cold maceration. Crushed grapes are prevented from fermenting by cooling for 30 to 50 days; this produces lots of delicate flavour and colour but no tannins – these are extracted by the alcohol, once fermentation is allowed to start
This was Aurelio’s opportunity to create a winery just as he wanted it. He and his winemaking team visited more than 20 wineries in California’s Napa Valley and in Australia before arriving at a vision of what was wanted, and a shopping list of expensive hardware. Heralded as ‘state-of-the-art’, much of what is in the winery is, actually, distinctly revivalist and back-to-basics. Aurelio’s firm belief in keeping the manipulation of wine to a minimum dictated that pumps would have no place in the winery. Gravity, the most primitive force of them all, would move grapes, the must (i.e. the juice before and during fermentation) and new wine around the building. And although consigned to history by many winemakers, Aurelio wanted to bring back vertical basket presses rather than use the more contemporary horizontal press. The modern interpretation of the old wooden basket press, from Austrian-French makers Bücher-Vaslin, differs from its predecessors. It is made of stainless steel, is airtight and is controlled by microchips rather than muscle power, but the principle of gentle pressing remains the same. ‘We are reverting to old practices,
Elderly ‘Founders’ Reserve’ Cabernet Sauvignon vines, soon after they were transplanted from the Micaela vineyard, front their retirement home at the Apalta winery
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Seen from the slopes of Apalta, the half-buried winery sits discreetly, bunker-like on the vineyard plain. The rooftop reception and handling area for grapes is in full view
realizing that our forebears were doing things the correct way,’ says Aurelio. ‘I went to Napa to see new vertical presses in action and saw that their gentle pressing made a real difference to the resulting wine. The only drawback is their slow speed when you have high tonnage of grapes.’ In addition to ubiquitous stainless steel tanks, ten relatively small 10,000-litre oak fermentation vats, nine imported from France and one made by the leading Chilean cooper Tonelería Nacional, are installed at Apalta. The small size helps control what goes on inside them during fermentation, and each is equipped with refrigerant-containing immersion plates that can warm or cool the must. Aurelio says the wooden vats provide good thermal reaction and gas interaction. He can protect the wines against the autumnal drop in temperature that can occur in April and May during the harvest. Conversely, the temperature can be lowered if needed. The partners engaged the services of Samuel Claro, of Chilean partnership Claro and Swinburn, as architect of the new bodega. He had already designed wineries for, among others, Viña Altair and Viña Errazuriz. The initial plan was to build the winery at the foot of the property by the access road to the vineyard. Plans faltered over finance and the project was put on hold for a couple of years. As an interim measure, a straightforward,
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Crossing the feng shuiinspired entrance lagoon of the Apalta winery
air-conditioned above-ground barrel store was built for the storage of cask wine destined for the two top labels of M and Folly and the Alpha reds. In 2002, work got underway again on the new winery. It was decided to move the location to the lower part of the vineyards, to enhance the view of the upper slopes and the perspective of the building from the edges of the estate. The high water table in the lower part of Apalta meant that digging an underground cellar was out of the question. So instead, earth was piled up around the flanks of the building to help create cool subterranean conditions above ground, which are enhanced with air conditioning on the inside. Working with South African conceptual engineers Technique Trading, Samuel Claro’s concept was a building that would blend in and pay architectural homage to its great natural surroundings as well as the processes of a winery, rather than make a grandiose statement of human intervention. Before Claro’s plans were finished, they were subjected to a dogma not normally associated with winery planning: feng shui. Douglas’s experiences in the Far East made him an ardent believer in the Chinese philosophy and at his behest, Chile’s feng-shui expert Sylvia Galleguillos was asked to come and dispense her wisdom. She had given the new Montes office in Santiago the feng-shui OK after ordering the drilling of small interconnecting holes between various rooms, and Aurelio and Alfredo had come round to accepting Douglas’s wish for feng shui to be applied to the new winery. She visited Apalta and at the spot judged to be the centre of the new winery, eucharistically transferred some Alpha Cabernet into 3,000-year-old Shang Dynasty ceremonial wine decanters, rang bells and said prayers for the success of the new building. Wine was then poured onto the soil to enhance its fertility and well-being and the remainder handed round for the assembled workers to sip. At the entrance of the building, Claro’s plan had included a walkway over a small lagoon, the water of which flowed away from the building. A fundamental tenet of feng shui is that prosperity will come only if water, representing energy, flows towards the
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The local priest blesses the winery in front of assembled importers and friends and (right) traditional folk dancing at the formal opening of the Apalta winery
centre of a building rather than away from it. The direction of the flow was duly reversed. At the centre of the winery is a fountain beneath an iris-like skylight that represents the sun by day and the moon by night. According to feng shui, this is the point of distribution of energy, connecting the building to the universe and beyond. The winery’s position blends in with the gentle slope of the vineyard. Being gravity fed has turned some of the building’s functionality on its head. Raised by forklift, the grapes are delivered to the roof, rather than to the ground floor of the building. In the open air, bunches are destemmed, faulty grapes individually rejected by hand, and the remainder gently pressed before dropping through chute-like openings in the roof floor leading to fermentation tanks below. The whole place revolves around gravitational logic. Because there are no pumps, a giant lift was built (the first such machine in Chile) that can raise whole tanks of wine up from the ground level to the floor above. The US$6.5-million cost of the new winery was paid for by Montes’ own reserves and bank credit, the majority being the latter. ‘We have been very fortunate because the interest rate for bank financing has never been as low as it is today, at least during my lifetime,’ said Alfredo. Despite the low cost of credit, the weakening US dollar (in which Montes sells its wines) has put a long-term hold on the full completion of the project. Viewed from above,
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Claro’s plan for the building resembles a knotted bow tie, and so far only the left-hand bow and central knot have been constructed. The right-hand side, which was to be used for storage, remains unbuilt. But this does not appear to have upset the feng-shui energybalance in the building, judging by the quality of the wines emerging, nor the highspirited celebrations of the grand opening. In front of assembled importers, press and friends, the local priest first blessed the new plant, after which a ribbon was cut jointly by Aurelio, Douglas and Alfredo. A folkloric troupe performed Chile’s national dance, the cueca, and a young ballerina danced the part of the Montes Angel. Music is a permanent if unusual background feature in the winery. Gregorian chants echo gently in the cellar while icon wines quietly age in barrel. ‘Somebody asked me if the wine seems to enjoy it, and I answered, “I really have no idea. But I love it. It keeps me calm in the cellar”,’ says Aurelio. It also prompted him to investigate further and commission work into the effect of music on wine tasting. So-called ‘cognitive primary theory’ testing by psychologists at Britain’s Heriot Watt University did demonstrate that certain types of music can enhance the way a wine tastes.
NIGHT PICKING In 2004, Montes achieved a nocturnal first by harvesting grapes for M and Folly in the very early morning, under generator-powered lamps. Aurelio borrowed the idea from the Opus One winery in California, who had been night picking for a couple of years. The main reason for night harvesting is that you catch the grapes while they are having their physiological beauty sleep; they lose water in the warmth of the day and rehydrate themselves at night, after which they are more balanced and in generally better shape. A second reason for picking at night is that the grapes’ potential to produce alcohol (i.e. level of sugars) is lower if they are picked during the night rather in the daytime, because of the plants’ rehydration. Aurelio is a proponent of ripe grapes, but this can lead to alcohol levels approaching 15° by volume that are just too heady. ‘By picking grapes at night you can achieve a lower alcohol level with the benefits of full grape ripeness,’ says Aurelio. The winery at Apalta suffers from a deliberate temperature control problem and one that Aurelio knew would necessitate some night picking. Because he believes that pumping wine around the winery damages it, he cannot cool grape must by moving it through heat exchangers before maceration. The limitation of the winery, a good one in Aurelio’s view, is that low temperatures cannot be achieved unless they come naturally from the vineyards. Grapes picked during the April or May nights are already at a nicely chilled 11° C, or thereabouts. At the lower temperature the fermentation process is slowed, so with less alcohol present, extraction is milder. Aurelio is sure the extra cost of night picking is worth it, as in his view it results in ‘fruitier, delicate and more expressive wines’.
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The breaking of dawn signals the end of the first night harvest on the upper slopes of Apalta
KAIKEN Barely 15 years ago, Montes started their Mendoza operation, leasing a winery and buying in grapes from local producers. They have since acquired three vineyards in the top areas around Argentina’s wine capital, and now own a large winery at Vistalba, quickly making a name for themselves alongside the old-established wine houses of the region. Kaiken wines took off as quickly as the wild goose they are named after. Argentina’s signature variety, Malbec, is fashioned by Aurelio Jr and his team to show Kaiken is the Tehuelche Indian name for the Upland typical Montes hallmarks: they’re big wines (or Magellan) Goose adopted by the Montes team, who, like these birds, frequently fly across the Andes with ripe, soft tannins. The climate ensures between Chile and Argentina that the quality of fruit from the vineyards is always excellent. At the Vistalba winery, tannin management has always been the mantra for the winemaking team. ‘We want soft tannins and do not want to over-extract the wines. If you extract too much at the beginning, you can never get rid of the tannins. But you can always adjust later on, by more pumping over or giving the wine longer in barrel where it picks up tannins,’ commented Clara Roby, former assistant winemaker. ‘Achieving the right tannins means picking at the right time, and pumping over perhaps for one-third of the time that other wineries pump over for. Aurelio wants soft tannins and that means you have to taste and monitor the wines frequently during the winemaking process. But Malbec is a big, soft wine and you can do different things with it.’
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The Vistalba winery
Three Malbecs are now produced, in ascending order of quality: Kaiken Reserve, Kaiken Ultra and Mai, Kaiken’s icon wine. The icon Mai, first produced in 2007, is a hefty wine intended for long ageing; it is constructed entirely of Malbec, from three vineyards whose terroirs bring out different sides of the variety’s character: floral scents in the bouquet from Kaiken’s Agrelo estate (40 per cent), elegance and balance from their Vistalba estate (40 per cent), and minerality on the nose, along with structure and power on the palate from the Uco Valley (20 per cent, from other growers). It has won over many critics, one of the recent being Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate, which awarded the 2010 vintage a bestever 93 points. Reserve and Ultra Cabernet Sauvignons are also produced from old vines at the Vistalba vineyards, producing wines softer in style than typical Argentine Cabernets. Kaiken’s icon Mai wine came out top in a competition for the best modern Argentine label design (by Douglas’s son-in-law Ignacio Williamson). Mai means ‘first’ in the local Pehuenche Indian dialect
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Making use of Mendoza’s diverse viticultural palette and with the intention of offering more than just monovariety Malbec, Aurelio Jr makes two red blends under the Terroir Series label, one Cabernet based, with dashes of Malbec and Petit Verdot; the other Malbec based with additional Bonarda and Petit Verdot. Both are fun, generous wines that successfully bring together the varieties’ complementary structures, fragrances and tannin levels. Cabernet Franc, normally a supporting-role grape, has become fashionable on its own in Argentina. Some believe it has the potential to knock Malbec off its top spot, although at the moment it is something of a rarity. As an overture perhaps heralding similar exploratory wines, Aurelio Jr has made 400 cases of soft and fragrant ‘Obertura’. Inspired by the bohemian Palermo district of Buenos Aires, it was first shown at Vinexpo 2015. Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc sourced from Gualtallary, a cool, calcareous, micro-region high up in the Uco Valley, make limited quantities of a sparkling wine. Aurelio Jr uses the traditional method and keeps the wine on its lees in bottle for 24 months. The end result is a delicious, creamy, medium-bodied wine that will go down well with Argentina’s sparkling-wine-thirsty drinkers (who consume a lot more fizz per head than do Chileans). Also from Gualtallary come excellent (partially oak-aged) Ultra Chardonnay and, more recently, Terroir Series Sauvignon Blanc (partially fermented in oak), both wines demonstrating how the great day/night temperature changes in vineyards at 1,500 metres enhance both white wines’ varietal characters, to impressive effect.
Deep inside the cavernous Kaiken winery at Vistalba, purchased in 2010 with a capacity of 150,000 cases. Aurelio’s son Aurelio Jr runs the Kaiken winemaking operation, assisted by an all-Argentine team of staff. Unlike the other foreign wineries investing in Mendoza that tend to bring their own people from abroad, Kaiken is very much an Argentine operation
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NAPA ANGEL The story of Montes operation in California begins at the other end of the western Pacific seaboard, on the southern seas of Chile. Aurelio and Douglas were on a sailing trip together, when a violent storm forced them to take shelter in a bay – and then broke their anchor. Drifting dangerously, they were forced to sail on through the night rather than risk being dashed against the rocks. The frightening ordeal spurred them on to take a new risk and challenge: Napa Valley in California. As Cabernet Sauvignon producers, to them Napa represented something of a holy grail; a ‘cathedral’ of Cabernet, as they put it, home to some of the world’s most highly prized examples of the variety. They formed a joint venture with two importers, Alex Guarachi of Guarachi Wine Partners in the USA and Hi Sang Lee of Nara in Korea; Aurelio was able to find supplies of grapes and lease a winery. Grapes are now sourced from three different AVAs (American Viticultural Areas – the USA’s designated geographical areas) in southern Napa: Yountville, Coombsville and Oak Knoll, and two high-end Cabernets are produced: Napa Angel and a reserve cuvée called Aurelio’s Selection. Aurelio hired young Chilean winemaker Jorge Gutierrez, who had been working in California, and the results have been impressive: a 97 score in the Wine Enthusiast for the first 2006 vintage of Aurelio’s Selection. In 2010, Montes launched two wines made from fruit sourced further south in up-and-coming Paso Robles, an area that has gained a reputation for outstanding Syrah: Star Angel is made entirely of it, while the superior Star Angel Aurelio’s Selection is a fashionable Rhône-style blend of Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre. Since then, a Pinot Noir from Santa Rita Hills has been added to the range.
AURELIO’S
FAVOURITE WINES TAITA 2009
‘This is the second release of this magnificent wine. The fruit expression and elegance have reached another dimension. I am extremely happy with how this wine has developed after the three years in bottle. During this vintage, we saw the very first signs of drought; waterflow in the channels bringing water from the Andes slowed faster than in previous years. Varieties such as Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon suffered stress. In general, grape health was very good. All this contributed to a very concentrated and firm Taita. I was able to make a robust, lingering and elegant wine.’
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ALPHA M 2011 ‘This was a particularly good vintage. It has the ideal combination of a few years of ageing and the youth of the fruit that still is very important part of its personality. After a prolonged, cold spring, summer started late, and towards the end of the summer we had some rain. But nothing too surprising. The cool weather led to poor fruit set; yields were down by 22 per cent, which is always good when you are looking for quality. Despite the cooler season, grapes came in healthy and clean, thanks to the lower yields, with good concentration, colour and fresh acidity.’
ALPHA CABERNET SAUVIGNON 2012 ‘This is the first wine made with dry-farmed grapes and the results are obvious. Enhanced fruit expression, softer tannins and more elegance. I think we have taken a new step forward in the way of making wines in Chile. Unirrigated vines are the future for better quality wines and at the same time, more sustainable. Grape ripening times were patchy, even for the same variety, with some areas early compared to historical averages, so picking dates overlapped, which complicated harvest management. The total absence of rain during ripening and harvest meant grapes were picked in the healthiest of conditions. (This same lack of rainfall during the previous winter had, however, left the region’s water resources severely depleted.) Heat was excessive, and unusually so, in the month before harvest. As a comparison, in 2011 there were 4 days when temperatures rose above 30°C (which is favourable for preserving polyphenols and aromas); this season, however, saw 14 days above 30°C, and about 17 days when temperatures were even higher. The lack of spring rain encouraged good flowering and fruit set. We harvested three weeks early.’
FOLLY 2010 ‘I have a special inclination towards Syrah. It is one of my favourite (if not my favourite) grape varieties. Generous, fruit driven, expressive and elegant at the same time. As I always say, it’s a wine to be enjoyed on a tranquil day, with enough peace of mind to enjoy every sip of it ... I like 2010 because it has a lot of character. It was our earthquake harvest. Yields were low and concentration high: an ideal combination. In fact, following a cold, wet winter and a cool spring, budbreak and veraison were delayed significantly – up to three weeks in some places. Low yields helped in this cool vintage in the Colchagua Valley. Harvest took place two weeks later than usual, but the grapes were ripe enough.’
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KAIKEN ULTRA MALBEC 2013 ‘My favourite from Kaiken. Generous, full of life and elegant; fresh and mouth-filling. This already acclaimed vintage will last for years, giving us the chance to enjoy it for a long time. The 2013 harvest was marked by lower than usual temperatures. Weather conditions were marked by a dry spring – very common in Mendoza. This favoured good flowering and fruit set, allowing us to make this wine with more voluptuous body. High early summer temperatures and hot nights called for careful irrigation management to avoid plant dehydration. From half-way through, to the end of, summer, weather conditions changed and extremely low temperatures were again recorded. Cooler nights gave us fruit with perfect maturity at harvest. Scarce rainfall and low humidity resulted in healthy plants, allowing us to wait for the ideal moment to pick in April. In a nutshell, a very good harvest.’
KAIKEN TERRIOR SERIES TORRONTES 2014 ‘Soft, lingering, fresh, delicious wine. This is what I call a “terrace wine”, ideal with good conversation or for reflecting on life. Ripe fruit, and lovely, delicate acidity make this wine a perfect partner for midday relaxation. Grapes for this wine are grown in the very beautiful and mystical Cafayate Valley in the Salta region. Not only are the conditions exceptional for making high-quality wines, but it also has very old vineyards – 80 years old on average – which produce low yields per hectare and tremendous aromatic concentration. The vineyards are located at an altitude of 1,600 metres, where the climate is cool and the grapes produce fresh wines with very good acidity.’
PURPLE ANGEL 2009 ‘Another outstanding wine. Fruit, elegance and complexity. The spicy character provided by the Carmenère and the strength given by the Petit Verdot make this wine superb. As already mentioned, 2009 produced very concentrated grapes because of the initial period of a drought. Carmenère reacted well, showing no signs of dehydration. Yields were 5 to 8 per cent down, helping concentration.’
OUTER LIMITS SAUVIGNON BLANC 2015 ‘I like this wine because it expresses youth, life and movement. It is a young, nervous wine with lovely minerality and fruit expression. The 2014/15 season was “normal” up and down the country, in terms of precipitation and the availability of water during the seasonal stages that need it most. The spring was frostfree in Zapallar (unlike the previous season, when frost affected much of the area and significantly reduced production). After a very cloudy January, February was clear with better luminosity, enabling the grapes to reach perfect ripeness mid-March, as is usual in the valley. Grapes had very crisp, aromatic skins and just the right sugar/acid balance, allowing us to make an outstanding Sauvignon Blanc.’
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The Montes teams
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A
GENERATION AGO,
Montes was an unknown cottage industry operating from the living rooms of its founding partners. It had no permanent address or telephone number and the export department comprised the contents of Douglas Murray’s briefcase. With the then modest aim of selling up to 50,000 cases of wine, Montes began as little more than a hobby of its founding partners. But over the past 27 years the winery’s growth has been parabolic, as if possessed by a life-force of its own, now entrusted in the main to the founders’ successors. It ranks as Chile’s seventh-largest exporter in terms of value, annually shipping in excess of 700,000 cases to more than 100 countries. Montes has become a powerful international wine brand, yet it has retained the engaging ‘boutique’ character of that initial hobby, still driven by the founding partners’ vision. According to Pierre Beuchet, former owner of Diva, Montes’ importer in France (and export agent for stars in France’s wine firmament such as JP Moueix, Beaucastel and de Ladoucette), the strength and calibre of Montes’ network of worldwide partners is second only to that of Moët & Chandon champagne. Wine is by nature a convivial product. Its cyclical production and protracted maturation allow time for enduring friendships to grow between those who share a passion for and work with it. As former Chairman of Wines of Chile and seemingly just
The enigmatic faces of moai lure visitors to Easter Island, Chile’s remote Pacific Ocean territory 3,512 kilometres from the mainland, where Juan Edmunds Paoa delivers 200 cases of Montes annually. Montes has consolidated its domestic position by buying 50 per cent of its own distribution company in Chile, Premium Brands, a sister company of its Peruvian importer. Previous pages: the sleek lines of the winery building at Apalta 108
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Loyalty personified: Sonia Montanares’ record as the longest-serving member of staff predates Montes itself. As PA to Douglas at Viña San Pedro in the 1980s, she followed him to the fledgling Montes and now manages Latin American and Caribbean exports
about every export-related wine committee that Chile has had, Douglas had an address book of international wine contacts that was the envy of all Chile’s wine trade. It has been an invaluable legacy for his successor and protégé in the export department, Carlos Serrano (formerly at Viña Undurraga). But from the outset, Douglas made a point of not automatically approaching the many importers he had worked with at Viña San Pedro. Commercially, he was aware that the profiles of some of those on the long list of agents with whom he had built up relationships might not fit the winery he and his partners were creating. More important for Douglas was his respect for the loyalty of former importers to the Viña San Pedro brand. He felt it was wrong to ask these importers to switch from one wine to another, unless of course they made the first move. Douglas knew that to break into new markets with such an outlandish thing as Chilean wine, a mentality of selfless dedication was needed. Before the promotional body Wines of Chile, collectively funded by Chile’s wineries, revitalized itself in 2002 by opening offices in London and New York, there was precious little ‘brand Chile’ promotion to speak of. Success in wine exports was down to the enterprise of individual concerns, not to a generic campaign to get Chile noticed. ‘A lot of people don’t even realize that Montes is Chilean,’ commented Douglas. His worldly view, born of an outward-looking desert upbringing, British roots and a US college education, helped him adapt and attune himself to the tastes of foreign markets. His commitment saw him spend a punishing average of 7 months out of every 12 away from home for most of his working life. By setting his sights further afield, Douglas was able to steal a march on other Chilean wineries at the time, which were mainly used to supplying the relatively undemanding markets of South America. ‘When you arrive first, you create double the impact,’ said Douglas, of the advantage of being a pioneer in new territories. The difficult task of filling the huge void left by Douglas has been achieved by Carlos Serrano, and his growing team, and by the increased involvement of Aurelio and Montes’ General Manager, Andrés Turner. Mirroring Aurelio’s constant re-evaluation of his winemaking, the export department keeps to Douglas’s workaholic ethos; adapting to market conditions and remembering his advice: ‘Wine has become so competitive at the top end, and it’s so important to monitor constantly the feedback from export markets’. That feedback and dialogue now includes the online world. In 2007, Aurelio and Aurelio Jr hosted the first live and interactive wine tasting ‘webinar’ (online seminar) in which they tasted and discussed their Californian Cabernet, Chilean Carmenère and Argentine Malbec with a global audience. Meanwhile, the growth of Montes chat on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has grown to the point where local monitoring by external agents, for example in the USA and China, complements the work done by the Montes head office in Santiago. Douglas’s was a global crusade in the offline world, spreading the Montes word and personally delivering his own unique brand of customer service to far-flung places (the top spot for remoteness probably being the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia). It
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was a level of service that also applied to receiving visitors at home. More often than not, Douglas himself used to meet the never-ending stream of guests upon their arrival at Santiago’s Arturo Merino Benitez airport, acting as their personal guide to the city, the vineyards, and sometimes beyond, as he did for the artist Ralph Steadman. ‘In what other multi-million-dollar business employing nearly 300 people would a founding partner still meet and greet personally?’ he asked. ‘In the beginning, other wineries in Chile failed to switch to the customer-service-driven philosophy that you need to succeed in wine today,’ he said. As something of a journalist manqué, Douglas favoured what now would be considered the old-fashioned method of writing personalized letters to potential importers. Letter blitzes on target countries was the simple (but not always effective) way of setting out his stall. ‘I once sent off 78 letters to importers in Japan and duly received 78 letters of polite rejection. Only the Japanese would bother to do that,’ said Douglas. One missive to India aimed at former importer Sanjay Menon did have the intended effect and became something of a presentational tool for Montes’ persevering agent in the subcontinent – although high taxes still hamper the growth of fine wine sales to the new monied elite. Expressed with Douglas’s characteristic modesty the letter began: ‘Chile is very far from India, but the distance itself should not deter you from considering our wines, given the success enjoyed by Chilean wines around the world. Please read on ...’ The thing was to find new agents of the right size and who shared the same vision. ‘The problem is that very few people do the hardest bit: the groundwork research. Even so, once you’ve got that behind you, all you can do is push with huge effort and hope for the best,’ said Douglas. Hoping for the best was the principle at work in June 1989, when
Entertaining visitors is part of the job. Douglas and Aurelio lead one of the frequent tractor-pulled tours up the slopes of the Apalta vineyard
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‘ First, trust. I trusted Aurelio Montes to have the ability to make great wines. Second, wisdom. The wisdom of Douglas Murray to do an outstanding job at marketing the products. He was a passionate and diplomatic individual. Third, their financial guru, Alfred Vidaurre, whose organizing and management of the complicated financial aspects of the winery was amazing.’ Alex Guarachi, US importer, on why he took on Montes wines
a case of Montes’ maiden 1987 vintage Cabernet Sauvignon was shipped by air from Santiago to London Heathrow for the then British importer Martin Wright of Hedley Wright. Ten of the 12 bottles broke en route. Martin was able to pick the only two intact samples out of the glass shards and hand-deliver them to the head office of the wine merchant chain Oddbins. The chain’s wine buyer had expressed interest in this new offering from Chile, but was non-committal. He told Martin that he did not know when he would be able to taste the wines, and it was left at that. Not expecting to hear anything for perhaps a couple of weeks, Martin drove for two hours back to his office. There, he was staggered to find a faxed order from Oddbins already sitting on his desk. It was for two sea-containers’ worth of the wine that he had just left with the buyer; a resounding 2,000-case vote of confidence in its commercial potential. This historical snapshot of one transaction among the many like it that followed over the years (minus the breakages) illustrates the great swallowing take-up from the wine trades of the first target markets of the UK and the USA. The USA, with its shared sense of American identity in the broadest sense and strong trading links with Chile, remains one of Montes’ top export destinations. At the outset, Montes simply did not have the funds to launch in the USA with a national importer as other wineries might have had, so Douglas adopted the slow but sure tactic of gathering importers state by state. He started with California, a wine-producing, wine-loving state, knowing a favourable response to the wines there would help elsewhere. Other states were soon signed up and before long each importer was asking for the whole country. Cleverly playing them off against each other, Douglas decided that the importer who showed themselves to be the most proactive would win national coverage. In the end, Alex Guarachi of Guarachi Wine Partners in California took the prize, and reinforced his commitment by buying a small shareholding in Montes and years later by investing in the Napa Angel Californian project. But Douglas knew that it was success in Britain’s more competitive and exigent market conditions that would pave the way for acceptance in other countries. And he got it. British importer Hedley Wright (whose trial, 300-case order was the first ever shipped by Montes) was instrumental in some public relations bullseyes. These gave Montes a once-only opportunity to grab attention before the market filled up with competing Chilean wineries. In the British national press, revered wine writers such as Oz Clarke extolled the virtues of Aurelio’s new Montes Cabernet and Alpha Cabernet under headlines such as ‘At last, something concentrated from Chile’ and ‘The fruity taste of democracy’.
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Eye-catching and alluring advertising
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Aurelio talks viticulture with assembled importers, at Marchigüe
Chile’s pariah status under the military regime of General Pinochet had been a great handicap for anything with ‘Made in Chile’ stamped on it. But after the referendum of 1989 and the return to democracy a year later, Chile came in from the cold. Many markets, particularly those in liberal-minded Europe, opened up to Chilean wine. Douglas took quiet satisfaction from the realization of his mini-master plan for Europe: to ship, albeit in small quantities, Montes wines to all the continent’s wine-producing countries. The greatest triumph is perhaps the presence of Montes Alpha Cabernet and M in the cellars of the several Bordeaux restaurants that have the wines on their lists. The last European country to succumb was Greece in 1997, after five years of attritional salesmanship directed at the then importers Boutari (who rated Aurelio so highly that they wanted to collaborate with him on a Greek wine). When an importer was signed up it was like a feast day. ‘You cannot imagine how happy we were,’ said Douglas. He, Sonia Montanares and Aurelio would virtually dance round the one telephone they shared in their first, two-roomed office in Santiago’s Providencia district. After two years of trading, things had moved a lot quicker than they expected. The number of cases sold in the three years 1989, 1990 and 1991 jumped from 7,000, to 20,000, to 90,000. The sales graph had gone exponential. ‘We could have sold more but did not have enough wine,’ said Douglas. It would be easy to forget that amid all this early success Douglas was still selling ceramic tiles. This he was soon able to give up. But taking the long view to a commitment to quality, he and his partners did not take any money out in dividends. Any profits were ploughed straight back into vineyards and the winery.
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The world’s great international wine fairs are the ideal meeting point for importers keen to add new wines to their portfolios and for Montes to show the world the fruits of their labours. In an aisle bustling with merchants, hoteliers, sommeliers, restaurateurs, journalists and the occasional freeloader, a handshake, a glass proffered and a couple of mouthfuls of Montes limpid Cabernet created a momentary impression and Alfredo and his wife Marisa enjoy a lasting business relationship for several Montes break during an early Vinexpo importers. Former agent Marnix Engels recalls Aurelio and Douglas standing shyly behind their exhibitor’s table at their first Vinexpo in 1991, where he was instantly impressed by an exposure of fruit in the Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Sauvignon (awarded gold and silver medals, respectively) that ‘you did not find in the traditional world’. Back home, the partners’ wives, Lucy (Douglas’s), Bernardita (Aurelio’s), Marisa (Alfredo’s) and Josette (Pedro’s), were in the meantime selling small quantities of Montes to Santiago’s upmarket restaurants. Armed with the wine sales experience, at later fairs they would often help man the stands. The feminine touch certainly worked on Ciro Lilla, importer in Brazil (where there are more sommeliers per head of population than anywhere else), who admits that he was as impressed by the wives as he was by the wines. On top of the wines, the combination of Douglas’s and Aurelio’s charm and their personal attention to the Montes project endeared them to many and have undoubtedly contributed to their success. ‘They are people’s people and everyone loves them,’ said Marnix Engels. Importers across the world talk of the ‘family’ feeling and the spirit of collaborative association that Montes engenders, symbolized by the Angel. In Japan, Douglas used to be addressed as ‘Papa’ by staff at importer and multi-outlet retailer Enoteca, whose Chairman, Yasuhisa Hirose, a great admirer of Montes, named their company guesthouse after Douglas. As Dmitry Pinski, Montes’ former Russian importer, put it: ‘The Montes winery has a different kind of approach, it’s very personalized and very positive. The whole team is motivated towards success. And these things are contagious.’
Blessings on both your houses: Carlos Serrano and staff of Enoteca importers outside their ‘Douglas Murray’ guesthouse (left), and Douglas outside the Casa Montes restaurant, with owner Ishikura-san, in Tokyo
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Alphas Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon doing their bit for ChileanJapanese relations – menu of a lunch given in honour of visiting Chilean President Ricardo Lagos by the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 2003
But Douglas’s unbridled enthusiasm for his product occasionally landed him in trouble. Believing that every little bit of marketing helps, he had a habit of introducing himself to anyone, anywhere, he saw drinking Montes. Shortly after beginning to export to Russia, he was having dinner with Dmitry Pinski at Moscow’s well-heeled Pushkin restaurant, a favourite of local politicos. Having spotted a bottle of Alpha Cabernet on a neighbouring table, unannounced, Douglas got up from his seat and made for its distinguished-looking female imbiber. Out of the shadows, two burly figures suddenly appeared. They lifted Douglas up by his armpits, and thrust him up against the wall, his feet dangling helplessly. History does not relate whom the minders were protecting, but Dmitry quickly intervened and apprised Douglas of the inherent risk in approaching strangers at expensive restaurants in Russia’s new economy. Douglas used every possible trick to help spread Montes. The cloak of immunity conferred on the diplomatic bags of Chile’s foreign embassies was one useful way of getting samples of wine past tricky customs officials in some countries. Now it’s official: Montes wines are available to Chilean ambassadors on new postings thanks to an official arrangement with the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On the wider diplomatic front, a series of beneficial free-trade agreements have been forged between Chile and its important trading partners. Previously punitive tariffs slapped on Chilean goods entering the USA and Canada, Korea, the European Union, and recently Thailand, are progressively being reduced to nil. For a country that in the 1980s exported only 5 per cent of its wine production and now, remarkably, exports more than 60 per cent, these pacts bring a welcome degree of security. They have brought to an end previous quota squabbles and politically motivated blockades and hindrances, such as the notorious case in 1989 of three cyanide-laced table grapes allegedly found in the USA by health officials, which cost the Chilean fruit industry $300 million in lost revenue and led to a dispute that continued for a decade. At the sharp end of diplomacy, Montes wines may well have helped oil the wheels of international discourse. At home, Montes’ all-Chilean pedigree may be a factor in its favoured place in the cellars of La Moneda, Santiago’s presidential palace, where President Obama enjoyed the 2008 Purple Angel at a gala dinner given in his honour by President Piñera in 2011. In Brazil, before uproar from the country’s nascent wine industry halted the habit, Montes Alpha was the preferred choice of former President Cardoso. (After serving it to visiting President Chirac of France, local producers said enough was
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enough.) On a routine visit to Colombia, Douglas and Sonia Montanares were surprised to be summoned to the Presidential Palace to deliver personally a bottle of ‘M’. So enamoured of the wines was the First Lady, María Clemencia Rodríguez, that she interrupted a high-level presidential meeting to introduce the Chilean visitors, and later attended all the wine trade tastings with police escort. In Hong Kong, before the handover of the British colony to China, consignments of Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon and Alpha Chardonnay were regularly delivered to Government House, on the instructions of the last British Governor and Montes fan, Christopher Patten. In China itself, Montes Alpha was the wine served at the state banquet given in honour of Chile’s ex-President Frei when he visited the country, during which he autographed a bottle of Alpha Cabernet, adding his own imprimatur next to Aurelio’s preprinted signature on the label. And Aurelio knew he and Montes had arrived in Hong Kong when the receptionist at the Mandarin Hotel asked him if he really was the Aurelio Montes and asked him for his autograph. Perhaps the greatest sea change in wine-drinking habits on which Montes has capitalized is the one that has taken place in the markets of East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and Singapore. Barely 20 years ago, wine was a cultural import only for these territories’ elites; whisky, rice beer and sake were what the populace drank. In the region’s top hotels (considered the world’s best by some), French wines were available and their distribution was in the hands of powerful French drinks Of the numerous accolades Alpha Chardonnay has received, none was of better publicity for Douglas than the 1998 vintage being voted ‘Best Chardonnay in the World’. In February 2000, the Slow Food Movement and Vinitaly wine fair organized a simultaneous global tasting of Chardonnay, called ‘The Game of Pleasure’. In 25 countries, 1,300 wine writers, sommeliers and enthusiasts polled their votes on six Chardonnays tasted blind. The Alpha emerged the clear winner, ahead of Chardonnays from Coldstream Hills of Australia, Mondavi of California, Golan Heights Winery of Israel, Tenimenti Ruffino of Italy, and Sieur D’Arques of southern France. However, the Italian entrants were unhappy with the result and lodged a complaint. So at Vinitaly 2000 a month later, a second ‘test’ was carried out by the Italian Sommelier Association, the result of which was the ratification of the Alpha Chardonnay’s clear victory. In 2005, Montes Chardonnay was again in competition, this time in India at a New versus Old World tasting held by the Wine Society of India and the Bangalore Wine Club. The event was run by Steven Spurrier and there were echoes of his legendary 1976 Judgement of Paris tasting, when Californian outshone French wines in a blind tasting conducted by French critics. In India, the Alpha Chardonnay 2005 won hands down against a 2004 Domaine Laroche Chablis
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groups such as the giant Rémy Martin. Shipping a container of wine from the Chilean port of Valparaíso to Hong Kong cost about five times as much as one from France; and on top of that, import taxes were stingingly high. The chances of getting a toe-hold in hotels and restaurants with a Chilean wine were virtually non-existent. As a great believer in developing parallel markets alongside the mainstream, Douglas had been there, tubthumping, 20 years before that and felt at home. ‘I visited the Far East so much partly because I fell in love with it,’ he said. ‘It just looked so different – the plants, the people, even the colour of the sky.’ The Douglas and Eduardo Stark take a small tea break in a creeping Westernization and changing consumer traditional Korean tea house with importers Nara Foods tastes in these growing economies provided fertile ground for wine-drinking to flourish. In particular, salaried women, emancipated from their traditional, subordinate roles, began to spend their disposable incomes on wine – especially white – attracted by its sophisticated, aspirational image. In the 1990s, as supply met demand, ocean freight costs plummeted and the region opened up as virgin sales territory. Although Douglas had an instinct for the Far East’s potential as a new consumer bloc, even he did not foresee the boom that would follow: Japan, China and Korea now equal or surpass North America or Europe as recipients of Chilean exports. And now Japanese importer Enoteca imports more Montes wines than any other country, bar the USA. Douglas maintained that ‘rather than seeing Asia as simply another marketplace to do business in, I have tried to understand their cultures’. In the so-called ‘immature’ wine markets of East Asia, Montes and Montes Alpha wine have had the advantage of pronounceable and memorable names, of an appealing generosity of flavours and fruit based on a French model; overall, of sticking power with new wine drinkers. Fortune has smiled on Montes and Chile, with events having given unexpected boosts to sales figures. In the mid-1990s, the US importer of the Chilean giant Concha y Toro, Excelsior, was bought by the even larger Italian producer Villa Banfi, quickly increasing awareness of Chilean wines across the States. In 1995, France’s widely condemned unilateral decision to conduct nuclear tests on the Pacific atoll of Muroroa resulted in a complete boycott of French goods in Japan. France’s virtual stranglehold there on the supply of quality wine was loosened. Douglas presided over the first trade delegation that followed. In a repetition of its historical role of filling the supply gap when the flow of wine in France has been interrupted (as happened during the phylloxera crisis in the nineteenth century and in the 1950s during the Algerian war) Chile filled the void, with Cabernet Sauvignon that has remained popular with the Japanese ever since. The only difference now in Japan and elsewhere is that Chilean wines such as Montes are no longer considered Bordeaux substitutes. They stand on their own, and in a fine wine market where the erratic and high price of classed-growth clarets can make life difficult for sommeliers, the wines benefit from Montes’ strategy of stable pricing in local currencies. Japan’s interest in the wines of its distant Pacific neighbour has attracted film crews to Chile on several occasions. On one visit, some of the leading wineries failed to grasp the PR potential of the moment and were either haughty or luke-warm in their reception of their visitors, especially as it was a Sunday. Montes alone achieved a public relations
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coup after Douglas, in typical style, greeted his guests personally and showed the respect that goes down well with the etiquette-conscious Japanese. The result was invaluable prime-time exposure for Montes on Japanese television, fronted by one of the country’s most popular celebrity actresses, Misa Shimizu. Indeed, Douglas’s relationship with Japan was such that it went beyond the Montes brand. His influence on the vinous habits of this relatively novice wine-drinking country were such that in 2000 Japan’s oldest wine trade magazine, Vinothèque, selected him as one of the six wine world personalities who have most influenced the Japanese wine market. In Korea, Montes got a huge leg-up during the Football World Cup of 2002. The importer Nara Foods, keen to make progress after the 1999 Asian financial crisis, sent samples of Alpha Cabernet to the organizing committee, who were planning the menu and wine list for the event’s inaugural dinner in the city of Busan. The Alpha was chosen, after which a Korean television film crew descended on Montes’ vineyards, from where reports were broadcast on Korean national television over several days. Since then, the Korean thirst for Montes appears unquenchable. According to Hi Sang Lee, Chairman of Nara Foods, Montes wines are ‘ordered as frequently as water’ in ‘almost every restaurant’. No wonder Korea is now Montes’ number two importer in the region, and, astonishingly, four in the world. Furthermore, thanks to a suggestion from Douglas to the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Mr Lee had the rare distinction of being awarded Chile’s highest honour for a foreign citizen, the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins (Chile’s founding father), in recognition of his work in promoting the country’s wines. The apparent health benefits of wine have helped in the Asian markets and elsewhere. Red wine’s life-enhancing qualities have been pinned down to antioxidants and flavonoids, the flavour-producing compounds that can reduce the risk of blood clots and heart disease. After undergoing heart surgery in the early 1990s, Thailand’s popular King Bhumibol Adulyadej declared that his doctor allowed him to drink only red wine, as it would aid his recovery. The king’s loyal subjects followed his example and Thai winedrinking habits changed dramatically overnight, as the country switched from drinking predominantly white wine to red. Meanwhile in Britain in 2003, government National Health Service doctors at Great Western Hospital in Swindon started to administer Chilean Cabernet to patients on the cardiac ward. Thanks to Chile’s strong Andean light and wide day/night temperature swings, her Cabernet contains significantly greater
‘ For Dan Murphy it has primarily been the people involved in Montes who set Montes apart from its contemporaries. It keeps coming back to their passion and pride in their product. This naturally comes through in the bottle and is the soul of their wines … Montes are more to us than business associates; they are cherished friends.’ Greta Coghill, of Australian importer Dan Murphy, on Montes
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quantities of the health-promoting chemicals than reds from other regions. The doctors’ prescription was Montes Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon (dispensed in wine glasses) and it made headlines in the national papers. Wine’s benign character is one apparent reason for it catching on in the market showing the biggest potential of them all: China. Keen to promote wine as a healthier alternative to spirits made from grain, which would be better used to feed China’s myriad hungry mouths, the government’s wine and spirit directorate COFCO (the China National Cereals, Oils & Foodstuffs Import & Export Corporation) held up Montes’ approachable wines as benchmarks against which the products from China’s own vineyards be judged. Bare-shouldered pin-up photos of Alpha M and Folly were even featured on a COFCO calendar. But it is the burgeoning Chinese middle class and its obsession with Western fashion and status symbols that has driven the recent boom in fine wines. The potential of wine, synonymous with wealth and success, was quickly recognized by the Hong Kong government. In 2008, it cut duty on wine from 30 per cent to zero. Overnight, trade to China surged and Hong Kong quickly became a global
In 2002, Chile’s ‘Group of Five’ top producers went on a US roadshow to collectively explain and promote their new high-end wines. From left, at New York’s Daniel restaurant (where M was launched four years earlier): Agustín Huneeus of Veramonte, Rafael Guilisasti of Concha y Toro, Aurelio Montes, Eduardo Chadwick of Errazuriz, Tim Mondavi, then of Seña, and Steven Spurrier, the British wine writer, who presided
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magnet for fine wine trading, even overtaking London as the world’s preeminent fine wine market. Montes lead the way in China, and despite a following flood of other producers, it remains the leading Chilean wine producer measured by export value. ‘The yearly allocation to us of Alpha M, Folly and the Purple Angel is simply not enough to meet the swelling demand from the Chinese,’ says Greg Brand building in China Li, Managing Director of importers China Wine Platform. ‘When Montes icon wines were first introduced to the Chinese in wooden gift boxes, we sold out within a month.’ To satisfy China’s and Japan’s thirsts, Montes’ Fine Wine Library of old vintages has had to be tapped; the first consignment of historic vinous treasure, 100 cases of Alpha M 1998, was even air-freighted to Shanghai at high cost to meet customer needs. ‘The challenging part of marketing Chilean wines has been trying to convince, not so much the trade – who trust you – but the press and the experts, that Chile can produce great wines,’ Douglas contended. Press files in the Montes office bulge with laudatory cuttings assiduously gathered by importers and local PR agencies employed across four continents. They attest to an overwhelmingly welcoming approval, often rapturous, of what Montes (and Chile) has achieved. But this has been frequently expressed in terms of a virtue from which the founding partners fundamentally preferred to disassociate themselves: value for money. The creation of M, Folly, Purple Angel and Taita have been expressions of Montes’ ultimate ambition to produce wines that deserve to be expensive.
Carlos Serrano continues the close, hands-on Montes approach with brothers Greg and Andrew Li, and partner Edmond Wong, of China Wine Platform
‘Project X’ was the secretive proto-title of the wine that became M. Confidence in it grew after barrel samples of the first 1996 vintage were discreetly exhibited at Vinexpo in 1997, much to the surprise and delight of several visitors. Its public unveiling as M in February 1998, priced in the USA at more than $55 a bottle, was the cause of trepidation behind the scenes. Montes had built a strong platform with the Alpha range. But even so, M was a very high-risk venture. This was not just in monetary terms, but because of the damage any failure could have done to Montes’ overall image as a producer. A staggered launch in key cities was planned. It was so important that things went smoothly in New York, London, Tokyo and San Francisco that the first launch, a kind of practice run, was held in São Paulo, Brazil, after which a useful feedback debrief was held with assembled sommeliers. Time was somewhat of the essence, as close on the heels of Montes was the Mondavi-Chadwick joint venture with their own signature ultrapremium wine, Seña. Montes was
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keen to be the first to launch, proudly affirming that theirs was a 100-per-cent Chilean wine, not the product of an international collaboration. New York, close to where the majority of American wine writers live, was chosen as the city to launch properly what was to be Chile’s most expensive wine in its 450-year-old winemaking history. ‘Unlike the Seña launch, we avoided a social, black-tie affair,’ said Douglas. ‘We wanted to place the emphasis firmly on the wine and show the wine The Hong Kong-based Chinese newspaper Ta Kung Pao to people who mattered. The formation decoratively introduces Douglas and explains Alpha M of the tasting room tables was like a and Folly to its readers in June 2002 classroom, and Aurelio and Douglas presented the wine like a play before critics. A vertical flight of Alpha Cabernets going back to the original 1987 was tasted, whose impressive bottle-ageing was in itself engaging to the critics, leading up to the M itself. Aurelio and Douglas spoke and tried to explain what the M meant to Chile and to Montes (‘A wine comparable to California’s Opus One at half the price,’ said Douglas). In the States, the critics were united in their admiration for the quality of M. Wine Enthusiast described it as ‘extraordinarily rich, concentrated and Margaux-like ... with a finish that goes on and on’ but imputed the high price as a means of being taken seriously. The Wine Spectator praised the wine for standing ‘apart from other super-Chileans for its understated elegance’ but later baulked rather at the price tag, declaring ‘Sticker Shock from Chile’. After its launch in Britain, Decanter magazine bracketed Montes in the ‘Cloud Cuckoo Gang’ (along with Mondavi-Chadwick and others) who ‘took it upon themselves to rip up the price rule book’. Douglas believed that most wine magazines and writers at that time did not think Chile could produce quality, and that they tried to find disqualifiers (an easy one being the price) rather than virtues. The American wine press’s points system for marking wine out of 100 seemed to him to reflect this. This wine scoring, although decried by those who say it is meaningless to judge wine by numbers, is a commercial fact of life. It cannot be ignored by producers such as Montes whose main market is the USA. To the outsider, small differences in points awarded take on what seems a disproportionate significance. But to producers they can mean everything. The first vintage of M was awarded 89 points by the Wine Spectator. When Folly came out it received 92 points. Douglas contended that ‘by then the editors had made up their minds that Chile really could produce wines of a higher level’. Be that as it may, the important question was, had Douglas and Aurelio read the market correctly? Had they produced a wine for which the consumer was prepared to pay the sum asked? The facts speak for themselves: importers worldwide had no trouble selling M. The prestige-label-driven market of Hong Douglas in heaven with Purple Angels at the Mexican launch of the wine in Mérida
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The influential US wine magazine Wine Enthusiast named Montes New World Winery of the Year in 2002. (Other contending producers included Penfolds of Australia, Villa Maria of New Zealand and KWV of South Africa.) Michael Schachner, Wine Enthusiast Contributing Editor, explained why: ‘Montes stands out for two main reasons. One is the fact that it began as a privately financed upstart not even 20 years ago, and today it sells its wines literally worldwide. The owners are quintessential frequent fliers, and no potential export market will be ignored. Two is the wines themselves. Across a broad spectrum, Montes wines are usually at the top of their class. And with respect to the highest-end cuvées, these compete with the best the world has to offer’
Kong was a good case in point. According to then importer Rob Temple, ‘the arrival of Alpha was the first time that wine drinkers looked up from their Bordeaux and said “this is serious stuff ...” Montes recreated this revolution with the advent of M. Again, it was considered by many to be almost foolhardy to attempt to sell a Chilean wine above HK$500 in Hong Kong, regardless of quality, and yet the first cases of M to arrive here were snapped up in a matter of days. Consumers were astounded by the quality.’ As the vines of Apalta have aged and Aurelio’s knowledge of the vineyard has deepened, the quality and the reputation of the wine has improved with each vintage. The world’s supplies of M are now strictly rationed on a country-by-country basis. Montes chose to put itself through stage fright again, four years after the launch of M, when the 2000 Folly made its debut. The player they had introduced to the performance this time, and the cause for trepidation, was a new variety in Chile: Syrah. The wine-drinking world had become accustomed to the expensive ultra-premium Chileans such as M. But an ultra-premium Syrah was a radical departure from Chile’s inheritance of Bordeaux-style wines; the grape had been in Chile barely ten years and, apart from on the slopes of Apalta, it had an unproven track record. Knowing that the concept of ‘icon’ wines goes down better in the USA than perhaps elsewhere, New York was again chosen as the launch city and 65 invitations were sent out. Those on the guest list included three editors from the Wine Spectator, two Chilean ambassadors and, among others, James Halliday, the influential Australian writer and winemaker. The day before the launch, Marsha Palanci of Cornerstone Communications, Montes’ former PR in The Folly Angel makes her debut
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the USA, called Douglas to say ‘that the most incredible thing is happening. People are asking for invitations to come.’ In the end, it was a sell-out. Unusually, everyone who was invited came, plus a couple of extras. The artist Ralph Steadman, painter of Folly’s Atacama desertscapes, was there and remembers ‘the sky was grey, and the mood was very optimistic but apprehensive. Douglas and Aurelio were very nervous. It was like the first night of a new ballet.’ After tasting a wine that was unimaginably pure, intense and well balanced, no-one said anything. Then someone started to clap and applause quickly broke out around the room. ‘Aurelio had invented a new way for Syrah,’ says Steadman. Douglas felt he had touched wine heaven and a shiver went down his spine. Aurelio lit a large cigar. Needless to say, James Halliday was as impressed as anyone that day and on his return home wrote a piece in The Weekend Australian saying ‘Obviously enough, it is a very youthful wine, years away from its peak. But it is technically perfect and ... proclaims its quality.’
Douglas, Marsha Palanci, Montes’ then PR in the USA, and label artist Ralph Steadman let their hair down after the Folly launch at New York’s Daniel restaurant in 2002
Montes’ precocious commercial success has not gone unnoticed by business academia. As part of a broader study of the Chilean wine industry, MBA students at the well-respected Kellogg School of Management of Northwestern University in Illinois decided to analyse Montes’ strategy. Under scrutiny were the different marketing tactics adopted by four of Chile’s leading producers. Douglas and his colleagues were flattered by the attention, but there was not much to learn from results of the study. The unremarkable conclusion was a rubber-stamping: as a premium wine producer, Montes and its importers were doing everything right in placing its wines in upmarket wine stores and restaurants. Such is their business success that Aurelio and Douglas were selected to be mentors of the 2004 Wine MBA course, a programme ran jointly by four institutions: Bordeaux Business School, the University of California at Davis, Santiago’s Catholic University and the University of South Australia at Adelaide. The course was designed to equip today’s wine marketeers with a perspective and understanding that befits what is a pan-global industry. The course’s previous two mentors were Robert Mondavi and Baroness Philippine de Rothschild – Aurelio’s and Douglas’s joint-selection as the third speaks volumes about the place Montes has earned at the heart of the wine establishment. In his mentor’s speech at Bordeaux to the Douglas reveals the Order of the Angel, first awarded to loyal friends of Montes at a Marchigüe lunch, on the occasion of the opening of the Apalta winery
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graduating class of 2004, Douglas concluded with the following simple advice: ‘Remember this: no-one ever achieved fame by imitation. People and producers who have greatly influenced the wine world are those who have dared to do things differently.’ In a move to enhance its renown at the highest level of wine learning and professional qualification, Montes sponsored a scholarship at the UK’s prestigious Institute of Masters of Wine, named after Alfredo Vidaurre. It was a matter of huge satisfaction and pride for Douglas and Alfredo to see how far they had reached in such a short period of time. ‘It has been an uphill task trying to persuade wine critics that Chile has the potential to produce really world-class wines such as M and Folly. But I think we have done that,’ Douglas said. ‘We now have to wait for what I believe is the last hurdle. That is to demonstrate that the top wines now being made have the capacity to age. Perhaps 10 to 15 years from now, Chilean wines will have proved that they can last the distance.’
Hi Sang Lee, Aurelio, Alex Guarachi and Douglas launch the Napa Angel wines in San Francisco in 2008
The tortuous beginning of the journey for shipments of Kaiken. The wines are trucked from Mendoza over the 3,175-metre Cristo Redentor pass in the Andes, then down these vertiginous hairpin bends into Chile for shipping from Valparaíso. Consolidated shipments help reduce costs and the lengthy and sometimes hazardous journey across the Argentine pampas to distant Buenos Aires is bypassed. In a world oversupplied with wine brands, selling a new one is not easy. But Kaiken has had a helping hand from its Montes parentage; the wines are now available in more than 45 countries, in the hands of the same importers as their Chilean cousins. In Argentina itself, Kaiken now handles the distribution of its own wines
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Douglas and Alfredo were sadly denied the chance of seeing that confirmation, which seems that much closer now, following the appearance of Taita, a wine intended for long ageing and described by Aurelio as his ‘supreme achievement’. Predominantly made from some exceptional Cabernet Sauvignon blessed by growing on an area of unusual glacier-origin soils, the first 2007 vintage made its debut to coincide with Montes’ 25th anniversary, celebrated in 2013. By then well practised in wine launches, the extended birthday party/launch began at Vinexpo in Bordeaux and toured China, Korea and India, then Colombia, Peru and the USA. Vertical tastings of Alpha Cabernets going back to the original 1987 gave the occasions a fascinating historical perspective. Less ground-breaking than M or Folly in terms of winemaking, Taita nonetheless showed how much progress Montes and Chile has made since M’s appearance 15 years earlier. Then, M attracted some criticism for a cost that was one-sixth that of Taita’s $300 per bottle price, which didn’t raise an eyebrow. The task of keeping the founding character of Montes alive now rests with Aurelio, (successor to Douglas as ‘Guardian of the Spirit’), his colleagues, and those who follow. Now after more than a quarter of a century of making innovative wines, ranging from the everyday to the ‘grand cru’, no-one can question Montes’ place in the ranks of the best. There is now a history, a lineage, which began with the vision of the founding partners, and which will continue to be commemorated as Chile reinforces its deserved place among world-class wine producers.
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THE MONTES/KAIKEN TEAMS Montes Aurelio Montes B. Andrés Turner Carlos Serrano Luis Cabezas Sonia Montanares Eduardo Stark Dennis Murray Evelyn Ramirez Javiera Rueda Matías Barros Sebastian Alveal Benjamin Fernández
President and Chief Winemaker Managing Director Commercial Director, Montes and Kaiken Finance Manager Montes and Kaiken Latin America and Caribbean sales Montes and Kaiken Holland, Germany and Asia sales (except China) Montes and Kaiken Pacific Islands, New Zealand and Australian sales Chile sales Chile sales Montes and Kaiken USA sales Scandinavia and Europe sales Montes and Kaiken Middle East and Europe sales
Eduardo Wexman Alma Brown
Montes and Kaiken Marketing Manager Product Manager – Marketing
Gustavo Hörmann Jorge Gutierrez Bernardo Troncoso Rodrigo Barría
Winemaking Winemaking Winemaking Estates Manager
Patricia Osenga Vanessa Moreno Paula Muñoz
Managing Director’s Assistant Montes and Kaiken Export Assistant Montes and Kaiken Export Assistant
Kaiken Aurelio Montes Jr Rogelio Rabino
Chief Winemaker Winemaker
Ignacio Torti Pablo Moya Ana María Correas Tomás Marconetti Jorge Muñoz
Commercial Manager and UK, Argentina and Mexico sales Finance Perú, Colombia and Brazil sales; also sales in Mendoza Scandinavia and Europe sales Argentina sales
Florencia Piazza
Marketing Assistant
Shipping Department: Mauricio Muñoz (Montes & Kaiken) Alba Rodriguez Patricia Esparza Massiel Cordero Camila Nuñez Dario Tortarolo Eduardo Cambria Carlos Serrano, Eduardo Stark and Aurelio Montes at Vinexpo Bordeaux 2015
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MONTES TIMELINE 1988 1989 Montes Sauvignon Blanc wins gold medal at Vinexpo
Discover Wines founded, later changed to Viña Montes. Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon first vintage, 1987
1990 1991 1992 1993
Alpha Chardonnay launched
1994 1995
First vintage of Alpha M. Vinexpo Civart trophy for Late Harvest
Purchase of land at Apalta and creation of estate
1996 1997
Syrah planted on upper Apalta. Alpha Cabernet sourced from Apalta. Launch of M
Syrah co-introduced to Chile by Montes
1987 Alpha Cabernet outperforms Bordeaux in Wine magazine tasting
1998 1999 2000
Purchase of Marchigüe estate
2001 2002
First Carmenère harvest for Purple Angel Launch of Purple Angel. Launch of Cherub. First Sauvignon Blanc from Leyda. First edition of Where Angels Tread published First Taita vintage. First Kaiken Mai vintage
2004
2006
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Vines first planted at Zapallar. First vintage of Napa Angel Cabernet Sauvignon
2007 Death of founder, Alfredo Vidaurre. Purchase of Chimbarongo winery
2009 Death of founder, Douglas Murray. Vistalba winery in Mendoza purchased
2011 2012
25th anniversary. Launch of Taita.
Apalta winery opened
2005
2010 Launch of Outer Limits Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc
Construction of Apalta winery begins. Winery leased in Mendoza
2003
2008 Sustainability policy adopted
Folly launched. Alpha Chardonnay 1998 voted 'Best Chardonnay in the World'
2013
First dry-farmed vintage of Alpha Cabernet
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THE WINGSPAN Montes’ worldwide distribution, with year of first shipment
1989 • USA • UK
1990 • Japan • Canada
1991 • Brazil • Germany • Puerto Rico • Netherlands • Ireland • South Africa • France • Uruguay • New Zealand
1992 • Spain • Italy • Denmark • Belgium • Venezuela • Switzerland • Australia • Norway • Sweden • Colombia
1993 • Mexico • New Caledonia • Paraguay • Barbados • Finland • Thailand • Ecuador • Peru • Iceland
1994 • India • Kenya • Luxembourg • Hong Kong • New Guinea
1995 • Korea • Philippines • French Polynesia • Turkey • Macau • China • Singapore
1996 • Falkland Islands • Austria • Holy See Vatican City • Argentina
1997 • Taiwan • Trinidad & Tobago • Greece • United Arab Emirates • The Bahamas • Dominican Republic
1998 • Malaysia • Lebanon
1999 • Indonesia
2000 • Russia
2001 • Bermuda • Estonia • Cyprus • Panama • Israel • Portugal
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2002 • Vietnam • Malta
2004 • Costa Rica • Czech Republic • Cayman Islands • British Virgin Islands • Jamaica • Guatemala • Poland • Ukraine • Cook Islands
2005 • Bolivia • El Salvador • Latvia
2006 • Aruba • Bulgaria • Turks and Caicos Islands
2007 • Croatia • Haiti • Honduras • Anguilla • St Martin
2008 • Slovakia • Hungary • Mariana Islands • Lithuania • Maldives • Qatar • Mauritius
2009 • Jordan • Samoa • St Lucia • Vanuatu
2010 • Kazakhstan • Seychelles • Belize • Grenada
2013 • Guam • Cambodia
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IMPORTER TESTIMONIALS ‘ The partnership between the teams of Montes and Wein Wolf is now more than ten years old, and hopefully it will continue for decades to come. Over the past few years, together we have done our utmost to build the Montes brand in Germany, and nowadays, when the subject of premium wines from Chile is brought up, Montes is the first name to be mentioned. But we are still at the beginning and there is a lot more to achieve for all of us. True to the slogan “From Chile with Pride”, we are proudly looking forward to the next chapter of this ongoing success story.’ Daniel Agbedor Wein Wolf, Germany
‘ As a family-owned company, we aspire to be associated with family-owned or controlled companies across our different businesses. In my view, the owners/promoters need to have a long-term vision for the creation of a world-class brand with quality pedigree. In Chile, no other family does better than Montes! We have been in the wine business for 15 years and always aspired to represent this great institution, which was founded on the premise of premium quality wines from Chile.’ Aman Dhall Brindco, India
‘ Who would not dream of distributing THE brand from Chile? I did, for many years … We knocked on the Angel’s door numerous times, without success. Persistence and patience finally paid off and the first case that was shipped marked a milestone in our company’s history. Why Montes? Because it is so much more than the number one brand in Chile with excellent quality products. Behind Montes is a legendary person and the wine history of a country. The dry-farming project makes winemaking more meaningful. The products therefore have a unique story to tell and they excel in quality. In a highly competitive business, this is what makes the difference. Equally important, we are both family businesses. We are thinking long term and want to build long-lasting partnerships. Such partnerships only form when there is a base of joint values and common goals. This is why I strongly believe that together we will build a success story in Switzerland.’ Corinne Fischer Bataillard, Switzerland
‘ The Montes winery is a classic example of an extremely successful company. Starting from humble beginnings over 20 years ago, they have risen to become the leading winery in Latin America. This is a case of four owners with a vision, each possessing a uniqueness and expertise in their own fields: Aurelio being an amazing winemaker, Alfredo being a guru in the financial sector, Douglas being a perfect ambassador for the brand, and Pedro being the farmer cultivating the grapes. The success of these visionaries started in Chile and they are spreading their accomplishments to Argentina and Napa, California. Their achievements are endless. This winery is world renowned, receiving numerous awards and high ratings for their wines from top publications such as Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, Decanter and Wine Enthusiast.’ Alex Guarachi Guarachi Wine Partners, USA 131
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‘ Atlantic Canada is new to the discoveries of fine wine. The Montes reputation, more than that of any other company, is for producing the finest wines in Chile. We knew this even before we worked with them. As Innovative Beverages sells the most premium wines in our part of Canada, we only want the best from each country. Every detail of Montes wine, from the high-elevation pioneering slopes, to the feng shui winery, to the quality packaging, leads us to the conclusion that Montes is actually an Old World winery, working in the New World. They are not concerned about mass producing bulk wine for profit, but instead focus on the best wine they can produce, the best wine that can come from Chile. This is like a classic winery in Barolo, Tuscany or Bordeaux. We like the small touches, such as the little angels made by the local ladies, the book Where Angels Tread, and the Montes sticker on my laptop computer. When Carlos was in Halifax a couple of years ago, he got in my car and proceeded to put a small angel on my dash. “This is to protect you and give you,” he said. What other winery does that?’ Danny Hewitt Innovative Beverages, Atlantic Canada
‘ In the early 1990s I was looking for a Chilean wine to add to our portfolio – a high-wine with the right people behind it. We were instantly impressed by Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon, by its fruit, its depth and its ripeness. All members of our staff are touched by the “Montes spirit”, which for us means passion, enthusiasm and honour. We value highly the Montes team’s professionalism and friendship.’ Yasuhisa Hirose Enoteca, Japan
‘ Touted as the market with the greatest potential, China continues to be elusive to many great labels around the world. To succeed, like many other great brands, it requires perseverance and doggedness. It does not need much imagination to comprehend how difficult it is to stand one’s ground in the face of French competition in the extremely competitive premium wine arena. Competition among fine wines is extremely intense in China. Nonetheless, the Montes brand is standing its own ground like a true champion.’ Greg Li China Wine Platform, China
‘ Viña Montes stands out because of their innovation, their preoccupation with quality, their close personal approach and their first-class vineyards at Apalta. Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon is classed in Brazil as if it were a Bordeaux wine and can be found on all good dining tables in the country.’ Ciro Lilla Mistral, Brazil
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‘ Back in the 1980s, when Chileans thought they had the best wines on Earth and could not understand why people from the other countries did not agree, Aurelio Montes was completely open to new ideas and used to say that he still had a lot to learn. Nearly 30 years later, the Montes winery lives by the rules of the modern market – which is why it is adaptable to change. You can argue about the struggle of the New World versus the Old as long as you wish, but the only company that modifies winemaking every year and works out innovative technologies is still Montes. They are the BMW of the wine business. Today, a most fashionable and desired vehicle comes onto the market, but in three years the buyers won’t be longing for it any more. The Russian wine audience is comparatively young, and it constantly requires the release of new models, even if they are created in a “winemaking paradise”. And Montes has yet to disappoint Russian wine lovers.’ Ilya Shapiro Arsenal, Russia
‘ Thank you Douglas for reaching out to me in 1994 and forging a long and enduring relationship. In just over a decade, you fostered Montes from a premium Chilean brand to a super-premium brand of the Americas. This feat is as great as Etienne Guigal achieved for his. You are forever my wine guru.’ Chawalit Techapaibul Ambrose Wine Company, Thailand
‘ Trialto Wine Group represents wines of people, place and time. We have been working with Montes for almost six years now and Aurelio and his team epitomize what we look for in a winery partner. I first visited their property in Chile in 2012. I was extremely impressed with their obsession with quality, from the vineyards through to winemaking, and then to their cellars. When I met Aurelio, it all came together for me. His vision and attention to detail make it no surprise that the wines of Montes are of outstanding quality. I am very proud to work and be associated with Aurelio and his team.’ Richard Toller Trialto Wine Group, Canada West
‘ When the opportunity presented itself to work with Aurelio Montes and his team, we made sure we put our best foot forward. This is one of the premier wineries in Chile, with a vision and directional focus to everything they do, and so to be part of that was very important for us at Profile. Aurelio Montes continues to lead the push on innovation, elevating the quality of his wine at each level. From the Alpha wines to the Limited Selection and all the way up to the iconic Purple Angel, he has stood behind his philosophy that good wine comes from the vineyard. We are very excited to see what the future holds!’ John Turco Profile Wine Group, Canada Ontario
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‘ Montes wines were introduced 15 years ago. On top of the quality of the Montes wines, I was impressed by the dedication that Douglas showed for a tiny market such as Tahiti and its islands. Each hotel and restaurant he visited had his personal attention upon his return to Chile, and this explains the success of Montes wines in most of our top tourist resorts. Being a French-based market culture, the wines from France represent the largest volume. It is quite a challenge to try and change that habit with wines of different origins. Back then, no distributor would take the risk of importing a premium wine from Chile. We accepted the challenge because we loved the wine, and Douglas’s passion convinced us to have faith in the success of Montes wines, and he was right. Today, Kaiken from Argentina is gaining popularity, ahead of Napa Angel on the road to success.’ Clet Wong Sodispo, French Polynesia
‘ Montes wines are unique not only because of their incredible quality, but also because they truly reflect the extreme passion of the company’s founders.’ Glenn Wong Premium Brands, Peru
‘ When I met all four partners in Chile in 1989, I was struck by their enthusiasm, their willingness to learn about the requirements of the UK market, their determination to succeed, and their true desire to pursue excellence in winemaking. They were neither timid nor bold – they had a strong vision and were committed to it. They seemed to want to challenge the norm, push back some boundaries, and see how good Chilean wine could get. They were always interested, friendly, amazingly hospitable, and were the very best people that I ever worked with in the wine trade.’ Martin Wright Former importer HwCg, UK
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INDEX Aceituno 19 advertising 112-13, 121 ageing 125-6 agents 109, 110 see also individual names Agrelo 74 agriculture 31 award 30-1 agronomy 31 Allende, Salvador 21, 35, 37 alpacas 58 Alpha 116-17 Cabernet Sauvignon 80-2, 96, 103, 114, 116, 117, 119, 126 Chardonnay 92, 116, 117 M 62, 83-4, 98, 103, 117, 121-3, 126 Merlot 82 Syrah 62, 82, 85-8, 98, 121, 122, 123-4 Altair 95 Amanya 43 ampelography 58 Andes 24-5, 72, 125 Angel 4, 80, 88 Cherub 89 Anglo-Chilean enterprise 54 antique vines 48, 49, 75, 81, 94 Apalta 32, 38, 52-5, 58-62, 67, 70, 69, 81, 82, 85, 88, 89, 93-8 El Arcángel de Marchigüe see Marchigüe assemblage 83, 84 Atacama desert 22, 32-3, 34, 85-6 Aurelio's Selection 102 awards 29, 30-1, 33, 40, 90, 92, 100, 115, 117, 123, 124 Banco del Estado 39 Bangalore Wine Club 117 barrel stores 82 Barría, Rodrigo 62 Barros, Andrés 44 Barros, Sergio 44 Baseden, Patrick 30 basket presses 94-5 beechwood, rauli 21, 42, 84 Beuchet, Pierre 84, 108 BHC group 36, 37, 38 biodynamics 73-4 Bodegas Franco-Españolas 35 Bonarda 74, 101 Bordeaux 58 see also individual names Bordeaux Business School 124 botrytis mould 92 Boutari 114 brandy 20 Bücher-Vaslin 94 bunch thinning 40 buying grapes 49, 50, 74
Cabernet Franc 58, 59, 61, 74, 83, 101 Cabernet Sauvignon 18, 19, 31, 39, 40-1, 48, 49, 58, 59, 61, 62, 67, 74, 78-82, 83, 90, 94, 96, 100, 101, 102, 11011, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119-20, 122, 126 Cachapoal 53 Cafayate 75 calicatas 71 Carignan 61, 88 Carmenère 58, 59, 82, 88-9 Casablanca 50, 53, 91, 92 Castillo de Molina 41 Catad'Or Santiago Wine Awards 92 Catholic University, Santiago 31, 37, 71, 78, 124 Caymus Vineyards 40-1 Central Valley 23, 24, 54-5 Chadwick 121 Chadwick, Eduardo 120 Chardonnay 43, 49, 50, 51-2, 75, 92, 101, 116, 117 Château la Bienfaisance 30 Château Lafite 40 Cherub 89 Chimbarongo 93 China Wine Platform 121 Cinsault 69, 88 Clarke, Oz 111 Claro, Samuel 95-6, 97-8 climate 24-5, 62, 63, 64, 67, 73 climate change 62, 68 COFCO 120 Cofradía del Mérito Vitivinícola 40 Coghill, Greta 119 cognitive primary theory 98 Colchagua 52-3, 89 see also Apalta; Marchigüe commitment 66, 109, 115 Concha y Toro 32, 64 conquistadors 18, 19 consultancy 38, 50, 91 Cordillera de la Costa 24 Cornerstone Communications 123-4 costs, labour 68 credit 38-9, 97 cultural attitudes 19, 34, 35-6, 49-50, 74, 109, 110, 116, 117-18, 120 Curicó 32, 39, 41, 42, 92 see also Micaela; Los Nogales customer service 109-10, 115 Dan Murphy 119 Decanter 79, 88, 90-1, 122 dedication 66, 109, 115 deforestation 55 denomination of origin imprecision from 48, 53, 62 precision from 24, 48 designs of labels 80, 85-8, 89 awards 100 dessert wine 92
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diplomacy and embassies 116-17 Discover Wine 42, 43 diseases 20, 58, 60, 73 Drinks Business 93 dry farming 67, 68-9, 72, 81, 82, 85 earthen jars 19 earthquakes 21-3, 82 education 36, 37, 42, 49, 71, 78, 124 agriculture 31 case studies 124 mentoring 124-5 oenology 31 scholarship 36-7, 38, 125 Engels, Marnix 115 Enoteca 115, 118 erosion 59 Errazuriz 95 Estrella Americana 91 Excelsior 118 exports 21, 40, 44, 92, 108-11, 114, 115, 116, 117-18, 119, 120-1 Fair for Life certification 68 fairs 40, 90, 92, 101, 115, 117, 121 feng shui 96-7, 98 La Finca de Apalta see Apalta flying winemakers 91 Folly (Syrah) 62, 85-8, 98, 103, 121, 122, 123-4 forests 55, 58 Founders' Reserve 94 Fundación Chile 58 Galleguillos, Sylvia 96 The Game of Pleasure tasting 117 Garcés, José Antonio 43, 64 Garcés, José Antonio Jr 43 Garcés, Matías 43-4 Gewürztraminer 92 Gran Reserva 81 Grand, Josette 115 Grand, Pedro 28-9, 44, 49, 79, 93 background 41-2, 43 company set-up 42, 43 Grange Hermitage 79 grass grazing 59 gravity 94, 97 green harvests 69, 78, 79, 83 Grenache 61, 88 Gualtallary 75, 101 Guarachi, Alex 80-1, 102, 111, 125 Guardian of the Spirit 33, 66, 126 Guilisasti, Rafael 120 Gutierrez, Jorge 102 Guyot training system 69 hailstorms 73 Halliday, James 123, 124 health benefits, potential 119-20 Hedley Wright 91, 110-11 Heriot Watt University 98 Hermitage 60
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Hernández, Alejandro 38 hillside growing 54-5, 58, 83, 85 Hirose, Yasuhisa 115 history 18-21 horses 52, 59 Huasco 19 huasos 52, 53 Huechuraba offices 34 Humboldt current 24, 25 Huneeus, Agustín 44, 64, 120 image 84 Angel 4, 80, 88, 89 designs of labels 80, 85-8, 89, 100 Kaiken goose 71, 99 imports 18-19, 33 barriers 20, 60 Institute of Masters of Wine 38, 125 International Wine and Food Society 34 Iquique 34 irrigation 49, 51, 55, 59, 60, 64, 66, 67, 72 see also water conservation Italian Sommelier Association 117 Itata 50, 69, 88 Johnson, Hugh 80 Kaiken 71, 72, 75, 99-101, 125 Bonarda 74, 101 Cabernet Sauvignon 74 Malbec 74, 75, 99-100, 104 Syrah 74 Torrontes 104 Kaiken goose 71, 99 Kaiken Reserve 100 Kaiken Ultra 100, 101, 104 Kellogg School of Management 124 Kollmann, Gernot 93 labels 24, 78, 79 design 80, 85-8, 89, 100 wines see individual names labour costs 68 laced grapes 116 lakes 66 Late Harvest 92 latifundio estates 21 leases 51, 71, 93 Lee, Hi Sang 102, 119, 125 letters 110 Leyda 43, 50, 51, 71, 91, 92 Li, Andrew 121 Li, Greg 121 Liberty School 40-1 lift 97 Lilla, Ciro 115 Limited Selection 91 M (Alpha M) 62, 83-4, 98, 114, 117, 121-3, 126 Mai 75, 100, 101 award 100 Maipo 53
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Malbec 19, 61, 71, 72, 74, 75, 82, 99-100, 101 malolactic fermentation 41, 84, 92 management of vineyards 68-71 maps 56-7 Marchigüe 32, 61, 63-7, 68, 69, 81, 89, 114, 124 marketing 81, 84, 110, 111, 112-13, 116-17, 118-19, 121, 124 online 109 safeguards and 116 see also fairs; image; naming; press markets 39, 80 booming 20 as definitional 25 evolving 19-20, 40, 42 exports see exports stalled 20, 21, 36 unknown 18 Matilla 19 Médoc 58, 83 Mendoza 71-5, 99, 101 Menon, Sanjay 110 Merlot 19, 39, 58, 59, 61, 67, 82, 83 Micaela 48, 49, 79, 81 Mission (País) 18-19 Mondavi 121 Mondavi, Robert 124 Mondavi, Tim 120 Montanares, Sonia 43, 109, 114, 117 Montes, Aurelio 18, 28-9, 43-4, 48, 49, 50, 51-2, 53, 54, 55, 58, 60-1, 62, 63-4, 66, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88-9, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94-5, 96, 98, 102-4, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118-19, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126 on Alfredo Vidaurre 38 awards 29, 30-1, 40, 90, 123 background 29-32 company set-up 42, 43 on Pedro Grand 41 San Pedro years 36, 37, 38, 39-41 wine brotherhood membership 40 Montes, Aurelio Jr 71, 73-4, 78, 99, 101 Montes, Bernardita 30, 115 morale boosting 39 Moscatel de Alejandria 19 Moscatel Rosada 19 Mourvèdre 52, 61, 69, 88 Murray, Douglas 18, 28-9, 43-4, 49, 54, 59, 62, 66, 68, 71, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85-6, 90, 96, 98, 102, 108-10, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118-19, 121, 122, 123-6 on Alfredo Vidaurre 36 on Aurelio Montes 32 awards 33, 123 background 32-6 company set-up 42-3 San Pedro years 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 wine brotherhood membership 40 Murray, Lucy 33, 35, 115 music 98 naming 93 of Alpha 81
of company 42 of Folly 85 of Kaiken 71 of M 83 of Taita 90 Napa 40-1, 94, 95, 102 Napa Angel 102, 125 Nara Foods 118, 119 Neruda, Pablo, wine brotherhood membership 40 night picking 98-9 Los Nogales 42, 79, 93 oak 18, 40, 81, 82, 92 Obertura 101 Ochagavia, Don Silvestre 19-20 Oddbins wine stores 85, 111 oenology 31 old vines 48, 49, 75, 81, 94 online marketing 109 Opus One 98 Order of the Angel award 124 orientation 62 Outer Limits 51, 61, 69, 88, 91, 93, 104 oxidization 32 packaging 84 País (Mission) 18-19 Palanci, Marsha 123-4 Paoa, Juan Edmunds 108 parasites 20, 58, 60, 73 parcel managers 68 Parker, Robert M. Jr 90, 91, 100 Parot, Nicolás 44 Parra, Pedro 61, 67, 74, 90 parral pergolas 72, 75 parronal pergolas 20-1 Paso Robles 102 Paternina 35-6 Penedes 35 Penfolds 79 Petit Verdot 59, 61, 83, 89, 101 phenolics 84 phylloxera 20, 58, 60, 73 picking 79-80, 83 by night 98-9 Pinochet, Augusto 21, 37, 38, 114 Pinot Grigio 75 Pinot Noir 43, 50, 51-2, 82, 92, 101 Pinski, Dmitry 115, 116 pisco brandy 20 Pizarro, Roberto 43, 70 plastic sleeves 50 points scoring 122 Pommery Gremo 34 Premium Brands 108 presentation 84 press 79, 81, 88, 90-1, 93, 100, 102, 111, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124 press cuttings 121 presses 19, 94-5 prices 121-3, 126
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ProChile 33 pudding wine 92 pumping over 94, 99 Purple Angel 88-9, 104, 116, 121, 122
Sunday Times 90 sustainability 58, 66, 67, 68, 69, 72, 81, 82, 85, 93 Syrah 43, 55, 60, 61, 62, 74, 82, 85-8, 98, 102, 121, 122, 123-4
quality measures 79 quarantine 20, 60 Quintessa 64
Ta Kung Pao 122 table grapes 44, 49, 116 Taita 67, 90, 102, 121, 126 tankers 35 tanks 41, 94, 95, 97 Tannat 74 Taransaud 82 teamwork 28-9, 32, 38, 39, 43 in buying grapes 49 scientific basis 78 Technique Trading 96 tectonics 21-3, 82 television coverage 118-19 Temple, Rob 123 terracing 58, 59 terroir 23-4, 25, 48, 52, 59, 60, 61, 66, 67, 74, 81, 85, 90 Terroir Series 101 tinajas 19 Tonelería Nacional 82, 95 Torres, Miguel 42 Torrontes 75, 104 traction engines 62 trails forest 58 wine-tourism 52 training systems 52, 70 transportation, tankers 35 tree trunk presses 19 Tricao 50, 51 Turner, Andrés 51, 71, 109 TV coverage 118-19 Twins 89
Rapel 53 rauli beechwood 21, 42, 84 Read, Jan 90-1 recession 38 recycling of cuttings 39 red spider mite 60 regional maps 56-7 Riesling 19, 32, 51, 93 Rio King 44 Rioja 35 Roby, Clara 99 rosé 89 Rothschild, Philippine de 124 Rumasa 35-6, 37, 38 Ruta de Vino de Colchagua 52 Ryman, Hugh 91 Salta 74, 75 Salvador Izquierdo award 30-1 San Pedro 32, 36, 37, 38-41, 42, 49, 79, 109 Sanctus 30 Santa Carolina 32 Santa Cruz 52, 62 Santa Rita 32, 40 Saury 82 Sauvignon Blanc 19, 43, 50, 51, 59, 75, 90, 91, 101, 104, 115 awards 40, 90, 115 Schachner, Michael 123 Schubert, Max 79 secondary wine measures 89 Seguin-Moreau 40 Sémillon 19 Seña 121-2 Serrano, Carlos 109, 115, 121 sherry 35 Silva, Claudia 80 Simon, André 34 sleeves, plastic 50 Slow Food Movement 117 soil and land see terroir Sparkling Angel 51-2 award 92 Spring Harvest 91 Spurrier, Steven 91, 117, 120 Star Angel 102 Star Angel Aurelio's Selection 102 Stark, Eduardo 118 Steadman, Anna 85-6 Steadman, Ralph 38, 85-8, 89, 124 Suckling, James 89
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Uco 74, 100, 101 Undurraga 31-2, 79 Undurraga, Alfonso 32 University of California, Davis 124 University of Chicago 36-7 University of Montpellier 42 University of South Australia, Adelaide 124 University of Talca 67 Valdivia, Pedro de 18 Los Vascos 40 Veramonte 64 Verdot 59, 61, 83, 89, 101 Veuve Clicquot 30 Vidaurre, Alfredo 28-9, 32, 44, 49, 62, 63, 81, 89, 96, 97, 98, 108, 111, 115, 125, 126 on Aurelio Montes 31 background 36-8 Cherub and 89 company set-up 42, 43 on Douglas Murray 35 San Pedro years 36, 37, 38-9, 41
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Vidaurre, Marisa 115 Villa Banfi 118 viùas 48 see also individual names Vinexpo 40, 90, 92, 101, 115, 121 Vinitaly wine fair 117 Vinothèque 119 Vistalba 71, 73-4, 75, 99, 100, 101 Vitis vinifera 18 Wagner, Chuck Jr 40-1 Waples, Justin 91 water conservation 66, 67, 68-9, 72, 81, 82, 85, 93 see also irrigation water sports 66 webinar 109 The Weekend Australian 124 wells 66 whisky 37 Williamson, Ignacio 80, 100 Wine 81 The Wine Advocate 90, 91, 100 wine brotherhood membership 40 Wine Enthusiast 88, 102, 122, 123 Wine Society of India 117 Wine Spectator 122, 123 wine-tourism trail 52 Wines of Chile 108-9 Wong, Edmond 121 wood bark chips 69 workforce 44, 49, 66 Wright, Martin 54, 80-1, 110-11 yeast 32, 84, 92 Zapallar 51-2, 71, 88, 91, 92
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PHOTOGRAPH
CREDITS
Cav SA 29 Karora 125b René Medel 19 Aurelio Montes 30 Sara Matthews 4, 31, 54, 64 Elysia Moon 118 The estate of Douglas Murray 35, 121 Jamie Ross 34, 45, 48, 55, 62, 66, 65t Carlso Serrano 115 ShutterStock 108 Ralph Steadman 85 Ta Kung Pao 122 The estate of Alfredo Vidaurre 36, 37, 59, 60, 115 Wines of Chile 22, 23, 24, 33, 53, 58 Wine Enthusiast 123 Viña Montes SA, all other images
Photographs in preliminary pages: page 2 – Montes’ Finca de Apalta estate page 4 – Inside Montes’ Finca de Apalta winery page 8 – Montes’ Finca de Apalta estate
English edition ISBN 9789569445026 Spanish edition ISBN 9789569445019 Text © Jamie Ross 2006, 2011, 2015 Copyright © Viña Montes SA 2006, 2011, 2015 Designed by Richard Pierce Printed in Chile by Gonsa SA
Published by: Montes SA Av. Del Valle 945, Of 2611 Ciudad Empresarial Huechuraba Santiago, Chile www.monteswines.com All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher.
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