Ever dream of owning your own vineyard and making your own wine? Then Chile is a place to make your dream come true.
Chile: Land of Opportunity
Chile has attracted winemakers from all over the world. One reason is its diverse and unique terroir making it suitable for many different types of varietals and styles. Wine is grown in the northern deserts of Chile and as far south as northern Patagonia. Yet the Andes mountains and nearby coastline throughout the country allows every valley to have a large diurnal range (temperature difference between day and night) to create balanced high quality wines.
Furthermore, there’s a nice balance of tradition and evolution in Chile. Although there are many old vines and winemaking traditions from its 400+ years of history, there aren’t strict regulations of techniques and grape varietals you must use in any given appellation/valley like in France or Italy. Chile is literally located at the end of the world–one of the last places to be explored by Native Americans and Europeans. Therefore, there’s a pioneering attitude which foments exploration in new territories. In some cases, that means going back to old natural winemaking traditions in older wine regions like Maule or using the most modern techniques in completely new places like Patagonia.
Lastly, the price of real estate here is less than in more well-known regions like Napa and Bordeaux. Therefore, new producers are popping up all the time. Check out our Pais and Marga Marga Valley articles to read about success stories from producers who started from nothing. If you’re a budding winemaker or thinking about becoming a winemaker, Chile is a great place to get experience and/or start your own label.
Make your Own Wine at Emiliana
However, if you’re like me, just a wine geek consumer, you might want something less rigorous without the huge financial risk. Therefore, you should start with the “Make your Own Wine” activity at Emiliana. For 28,000 CLP (~$35), you can taste 3-4 wines, create your own blend from those wines, and bottle your wine with your own label design.
It’s a great alternative to the normal tour and tasting if you’re a wine lover who has already visited many wineries and heard the same old spiel that you can read on their website. Instead of seeing another cellar of oak barrels and listening to them talk about fermentation again all the while thinking “when are we going to get to taste the wines,” you can head straight to the tasting and actually do part of the winemaking yourself.
It’s also a fun activity to do with your kids, as they can help measure the wines in the cylinders and flasks. They can smell each wine to help you blend it too. Then they can help you design the labels and cork the bottle.
Alpaca
Now, Emiliana should get some credit for being an organic and sustainable winery. Certainly do the normal tour if you want to hear more about that. They also have some alpaca on their property. However, they actually source and make many of their wines in different regions. The one you are able to visit in Casablanca is not where most of their grapes come from. It’s more of a showcase place made for tourists. They do grow much of their Pinot and some of their Syrah and Chardonnay there though. You also get the beautiful views from the heart of the Casablanca Valley.
My Experience Blending Wines
We got to start with 4 bottles of their Adobe Reserva line mono-varietal reds and then we used them to create our blend. This is basically their entry-level line, which retails for around 3,000-6,000 CLP ($4-8) in the supermarket. All of them have minimal oak influence since only 10-20% is aged in oak and only for less than half a year.
The Wines:
The 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon Central Valley (mostly from Maipo and Colchagua) featured red cassis, good acidic structure. A little dry and green on the finish. A lighter Cab with minimal oak influence.
The 2019 Carmenere Colchagua Valley has typical dry herbal notes on the nose with dark fruit, soft texture and medium to low acid.
The 2018 Merlot Rapel Valley features fresh plummy fruit. Better acid than most Chilean Merlot.
The 2017 Syrah Central Valley – from Casablanca and Colchagua fruit. Dark, round, a bit meaty, low acid and medium bodied.
I decided to make a Right Bank Bordeaux blend given that 2018 was a great vintage, so I could use the 2018 Merlot to be the main focus of the wine. Secondly, there aren’t really any Right Bank style blends in Chile. Instead of the typical Cabernet Franc you’d find in the Right Bank, I used Carmenere, which is a similar styled wine aromatically. I added some Cabernet Sauvignon too to give a little more acid and structure.
My first blend had more Cabernet Sauvignon, but it didn’t have the aromatics I wanted, so then I added more Carmenere and less Cabernet Sauvignon. This ended up being my final blend 65% Merlot, 25% Carmenere and 10% Cabernet S. I tried adding a bit more Merlot, but it also lost the aromatics that I wanted.
In the end, I created a wine with ripe Merlot fruit, herbal and slightly floral notes from the Carmenere mixed with Merlot to soften herbal notes from being too green, pushing more towards a floral nose and sweet tobacco. There’s also just enough acidity from this fresh year of Merlot and the Cabernet S.
Corking the bottle
Wax
The kids helped design our labels
Ultimately, we weren’t dealing with blockbuster juice of each varietal to make the blend, so the palate was still rather simple and there’s not a ton of length or aging potential, but I ended up with a wine with a nice nose and a ripe fruit easy drinking palate for everyday consumption. Emiliana’s most famous wine, Coyam, is a blend of 9 different grapes, so you get to imagine what it’s like for them to make this wine. The only negative is that since you’re using opened bottles to mix your wine and then re-bottle and re-cork the new blended wine, the wines need to be drunk within 10 days or just kept as souvenirs.
Emiliana also has a shop there and offers their wines at a discount. I bought their 2019 Emiliana Salvaje Syrah-Roussane Casablanca. 96% Syrah, 4% Roussane; 1,150 cases made. Organic. Unoaked. 5 months in stainless steel. No sulfites. Once filtered.
Tasting Note
I drank the Salvaje shortly after our visit. It’s one of the better Syrahs I’ve had in Chile. Nose is of bright ripe purple fruit and purple floral notes. The palate is super-silky and manges to stay fresh even at 3.7 pH. It also has some minerality from the granite soil. Doesn’t have the earthy notes you get from the Northern Rhone, but it has the elegance. Its acidity and elegance are enough to go with white meat or heavily sauced seafood if need be. Definitely not a high-octane California Syrah or Australian Shiraz. It’s a steal for ~$9. They export the Salvaje to Europe and Japan where it sells from $15-25. Look here. 92 pts AC.
Getting There
Be very careful not to miss the exit because that will cost you another 10+ minutes driving west down 68 towards Valparaiso until you are able to turn around back towards Santiago and then turn around again back west on the 68 to reach Emiliana. The little dirt driveway exit is off the freeway, so stay right and signal early because you’ll need to slow down enough to make a 90 degree turn off the freeway. They should really change their entrance because it’s not safe.
Nearby Restaurant Recommendation
On the day we went, Emiliana had just opened for the first time since the pandemic, so they didn’t have their usual food options. They nicely helped us reserve an outdoor table at a nearby restaurant called Macerado (who also have a restaurant on the property of sparkling wine producer Viñamar and in Algarrobo on the coast) instead. They offered delicious meat dishes prepared in front of you on the grill. They’re also organic. The serving sizes are copious as usual in Chile. I also got to try a local boutique wine: the 2019 Franco Wines Ensamblaje Casablanca. It’s a Merlot-Syrah blend from the same winemaker as Vina Casablanca. It’s a nice fruity wine with just enough acid to cut through the tender cured beef I had. Plus the Merlot based Franco matched the Merlot based sauce with thyme that the meat was slowly cooked in.
Another “Make your Own Wine” Experience
Laurent Wines (https://www.laurentwines.com/elixir-haztupropiovino) does a more extensive “Make Your Own Wine” project, but you have to have enough people or money to help pay for a whole barrel’s worth of wine. However, you get to help with the harvest and pressing, and decide the aging process before getting to the point of blending, bottling and designing the labels like you do at Emiliana. I’m assuming the label making is fancier too than the hand drawn labels you do at Emiliana. This would be perfect for a business to advertise their company logo while giving out bottles of wine as a gift for clients. Viu Manent has a similar “Winemaker for a day” activity in Colchagua and so does Santa Rita in Maipo, San Esteban in Aconcagua and Casas del Bosque & Bodegas Re in Casablanca
At home. In theory, you could re-create the Emiliana experience by just buying a few single-varietal bottles on your own and find some lab equipment and empty bottles to blend your own wine at home to drink immediately, but it may not be easy to find a machine to cork your own bottle, etc. However, it’s a fun exercise to do for any wine geek even if you can’t bottle it, because I’m sure you’ve had a wine that lacked a bit of fruit or acidity or structure or complexity. Why not try improving it by blending it with another wine?
About a year ago, I visited Hoops by Caviahue in Talagante, Maipo, who is producer who makes a red blend with his family and friends from a vineyard he planted in his front yard. He’s gone on to receive 90+ scores by major critics despite making less than a thousand bottles each vintage. He works for De Martino, so he had a lot friends in the industry help him. However, it’s still only a side gig for him. He only harvests whatever nature leaves him, which tends to be the grapes the birds haven’t eaten. He keeps it simple and fun for the family and ends up making a nice easy to drink wine. If you’d like to buy his wine, contact him via Facebook. The main point is that anyone can do it if they have a bit of land, do their research and love wine.