Bonarda is one of Argentina’s most planted grape varieties, with an impressive 18,500 hectares under vine. However, the widely planted Bonarda grape variety is notoriously tricky, both in the vineyard and in the winery, which is why it has almost completely disappeared from its …
Category:
South America
A clos is a common concept in France but rarely seen in the New World. Historically a clos referred to an enclosed vineyard, or vineyards, which might have been owned by one person or several. The vineyard owners worked together to build the surrounding …
While Colchagua is one of Chile’s most prominent wine valleys, Alto Colchagua is still somewhat off the radar. The highest altitude vineyards in Colchagua start from the higher estates of Los Lingues at altitudes of over 300 metres and run up to over 1000 …
South America’s wine regions don’t ever sit still. They are constantly on the move and in the last two decades we have seen several new wine regions emerge in previously unimaginable locations: the Atacama desert, Patagonia and in the heights of the Andes mountains …
Mendoza may be a sleepy agricultural region by the quiet foothills of the Andes, but it is now also home to the world’s first open source winery. OpenVino at Costaflores Organic Vineyard in Lujan de Cuyo is the brainchild of US expat and IT …
Mauro Von Siebenthal is a man of fine tastes: he knows all the scores of Beethoven, has a penchant for oil paintings and has been collecting Bordeaux wines since before he was old enough to drink. Born and raised in Switzerland, he spent the first half of …
This week I headed out to the Uco Valley in Mendoza to visit one of Argentina’s most modern and architecturally striking wineries – Bodega Diamandes. It’s always a pleasure to visit the beautiful Clos de los 7 estate in Vista Flores, especially on a gorgeous …
Garage wine is a trendy term that gets thrown around a lot, but – in my experience at least – in Argentina and Chile it doesn’t exist as much as you’d expect. Or at least, the producers of truly garage wine are rarely worth …
The rediscovery of Carménère is a fascinating story. While many different grape varieties have been brought back from obscurity in different periods of time, none have made such a fantastic reappearance as Carménère. Believed to be extinct for centuries, Carménère truly came back from …
There was little talk of Chilean Carignan before Vigno exploded on the wine scene in 2010. The first association of its kind in Chile, Vigno appeared as a small but formidable army of Carignan-fanatics ready to put this underappreciated variety on Chile’s wine map. …