Without a doubt, a top 3 destination for tourists visiting Chile is San Pedro de Atacama. However, few know about the wine from this region.
Why visit San Pedro de Atacama?
Although the Atacama Desert stretches from southern Peru all the way to around the Elqui Valley in Chile, most visitors’ first choice to experience the driest and one of the oldest deserts on Earth is San Pedro. To get there, most fly into Calama, a mining town about 75 minutes from San Pedro. 
San Pedro itself is a simple village with some traditional adobe buildings that serves as a base for casual to hardcore outdoor lovers to explore the striking and colorful landscape of the region. The combination of sedimentary and volcanic activity influenced soils eroded over centuries creates an interplay of texture and hues that look different at every angle and every time of the day. Tourists religiously get up to explore it at sunrise and sunset. Then you mix in the Andes, flora, fauna and Atacaman culture along with the perfect clear skies for unfettered stargazing, and you have a desert paradise. 
Winemaking in San Pedro Atacama
Wine has been grown here since the Spanish brought Catholicism to the region. In the early 2000’s, locals (called Atacameños or the Lickan Antay people) of the Atacama desert and the Altiplano (high plains) regions of the Andes started recalling that their ancestors used to grow wine. Hence, they started looking for vines in the area, and unsurprisingly they found wild-grown, old-vine Pais and Moscatel de Alejandria, the first two varieties brought by the Spanish. This is how winemaking began to be revived in the region.
By 2010, producers became more ambitious and added international varieties, sometimes grafting them on old vines. With so many individual producers making their own wines from different varieties, it started to become confusing how to differentiate each one. Thus, they decided to form a cooperative under one label, which now consists of 22 different producers. They called themselves: Cooperativa Viñateros de Altura Lickan Antay, and their bottles were labeled Ayllu, which means ‘community’ in the Lickan Antay language, Kunza.
Despite being the driest place on Earth, it’s far from the hottest place on Earth. It’s at high altitude with large differences in the diurnal temperature range. They can do things like night harvesting and irrigation from the Quebrada de Jere river to mitigate the desert conditions. Moreover, they have the earliest and longest harvest period of any region in Chile, starting as early as the first week of January and ending in April. 
They mostly do blends (of vineyards and varieties) as well, which helps them get complexity and deal with the conditions year to year. The wines are a mix of their vineyards located in San Pedro, which is hotter with clay soil at around 2,400+m altitude, Toconao, which has a similar climate but sandy soils, and Socaire, which is much cooler at 1000+ meters higher than San Pedro and has loamy, clay soils. 
Nowadays, they try to run everything organic and sustainable with solar panel energy for everything they do. They use a combination of native yeasts and commercial yeasts. Depending on the cuvee, they may use stainless steel, amphora and/or oak aging. They make about 12-15 thousand bottles total a year.
Tasting & Visiting Ayllu
Finding bottles of Ayllu used to be limited to the region, but now their entry-level red and sometimes rosé can be found in a few boutique shops in Santiago. As I always say though, the benefit of visiting the region and bodega is the opportunity to taste their other smaller production cuvees in their lineup in addition to experiencing the land where the wine comes from. With San Pedro, visiting is a no-brainer regardless of the wine, but now that they have an organized, budding wine industry, you can check out their progress and taste more of their selection. They now make a rosé, white, orange wine (Naranajo), entry-level unoaked red, an amphora aged red and an oaked aged red. They’re all blends.
If you’re in San Pedro and you don’t have time to visit the bodega, then you can find their wines in some of the liquor shops in San Pedro and two restaurants: Bar y Restaurante Caracoles and El Toconar.
When I first visited San Pedro in 2018, they did not have a bodega to welcome tourists. Now, they can host visitors in their bodega in Toconao (about 20 minutes from San Pedro). They have 3 tours: The Ayllu Tour (25k pesos) includes a visit of the bodega & tasting 3 wines. The Haalar Tour (35k) includes a visit of a vineyard & 4 wines. The Sila Ckibur Tour (45k) adds meeting llamas to the visit. Buying the wine at the bodega is also cheaper than in Santiago. Remember that local flights in Chile allow you to bring bottles as carry-on.
Tasting Notes
2024 Rose
Screw cap. 50% Cabernet Franc, 50% Petit Verdot. Only 1,330 bottles made. They say it’s flamingo color (flamingoes are a frequent guest in some of the lagoons around San Pedro). Juicy and fresh but also a lot of body and structure for a rosé. More dark cherry than say light strawberries. 91
2024 Naranjo
Screw cap. 90% Old Vine Moscatel de Alejandria + 10% Moscatel Rosada. 1,400 bottles made. Native yeasts. Not quite orange. More golden. Citrus, floral and leafy. Fuller and rounder compared to the rosé. Less acid but still medium acid. Soft tannins. Ripe and fruity up front with a long more savory and spicy finish. Quite clean and pure and less oxidative than many orange wines. 91
2022 Ensamblaje Tinto
65% Malbec, 23% Pais, 12% Petit Verdot; 2,660 bottles made. Amphora aged. Nose of dark plum and dried prunes. Some red fruit. Some herbal and medicinal notes. Full-bodied. Medium tannins. Medium+ acid. Juicy and fruit-driven. Fresh. Only stainless steel. This is so much more elegant and fresh compared to the 2020 which I reviewed here 4 years ago. There’s still a touch of dried fruit from the desert heat, but this is much more balanced and fresher. Before I relegated it to something to have with local game like llamas or guanacos, which are chewy and sinewy–both were just decent local novelty things to have in the region but unrefined. Now, I think this is worthy of higher quality meat and BBQ. However, local guanaco meat is still too chewy. 91
2022 Haalar Etiqueta Negra (Black Label)
Haalar means ‘star’ in Kunza, so both their Haalar labels cost a bit more. 80% Syrah, 10% Malbec, 6% Petit Verdot, 4% Cabernet Franc; 2,660 bottles made. Dark fruit, more savory olives and meaty than the last one with all the Syrah. Darker, a bit fuller and more tannic but still soft tannins. Medium acid, but still fresh. The other red feels almost tart in comparison. 91+
The wines I didn’t taste: Their white is made with mostly Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc and a bit of Sauvignon Gris. It undergoes mild malolactic fermentation. Their Haalar Etiqueta Blanca (White Label), is a red blend that undergoes oak aging.