Vineyard visits

Organic champagne in the wine cellar of the Raab Vineyard

Chile's Central Valley, where Santiago is situated, enjoys a temperate Mediterranean climate. This means short winters and long, hot, dry summers. It also means ideal conditions for most types of agriculture, which explains why Chile is a top exporter of produce and of course, wine.

Before coming to Chile, my knowledge of wine was..ehh...on the crude side. I knew my way pretty well around the bottom-shelves, the $2-$6 labels, the boxed persuasion. My favorite wine is Pinot Noir because it's easy to drink and I like saying "Pinot Noir". But living in the middle of Chilean wine country and suddenly having to write a feature story on the country's organic wine industry for The Wine Times (a monthly Santiago Times off-shoot), it was time to get viticultured (oh snap did I just wordplay viticulture? I totally fucking did).

In the last couple weeks, I did some hard research. I took notes off of wikipedia articles, memorized wine glossary terms, and of course, visited some vineyards. Through a lucky connection I was able to visit a modest organic vineyard by the coast that specialized in organic champagnes and talked to the owner over a bottle. Through another lucky connection (telling the next-door bike tour company that I would write a profile spotlighting their wine & bike tour for Revolver Magazine [for which I also write] if they let me take their tour for free along with my photographer/friend Loretta), I visited another organic vineyard in the Maipo Valley, also talking to the owner over wine and cheese.

There's still a lot of the grape to bottle process that I don't get. I mean a lot chemistry is involved and I fell asleep through most of that class in high school. But wow, so much to know about the ancient tradition of grape-growing and wine-making. And there's something about vineyard landscapes that I totally fucking love. With the same googly-eyed Thoreau-esque admiration I had for Colombia's Madalena Valley, with its rolling coffee plantations. Corn fields just don't do it for me. But if you can comb the hills with coffee beans and grapes, I'd say there's indescribable beauty in repetitive, monochromatic rows as far as the eye can see. I'll post the Bicicleta Verde wine tour article and organic wine feature story once they're published.

Daniel Raab's organic vineyard. On the other side of the hill is the Pacific Ocean.

Daniel pops open a bottle of his prized champagne. Instead of synthetic fertilizers, he uses manure from the zoo next door. The zoo saves on disposal, Daniel nurtures his terroir, the soil stays chemical-free, everybody wins.

Our first stop on Bicicleta Verde's Bike & Wine tour: Family-owned Cardanal Vineyard in the Maipo Valley

Fermenting tanks at the organic Huelquen Vineyard. Some exhausted cycle-crazy travelers ready to booze it up- straight from the tank spigot
After a long day of wine-tasting and cycling, my photog Loretta, me, our gringo tour guide Mac (who has a very endearing Nashville twang) and a van full of drunk tourists sang along to 70s romance ballads with the windows rolled down.