Month: April 2016

Chile has been filled with the unexpected for us. We’ve had the opportunity to meet some native Chileans and others that have adopted Chile as their home. In conversation, the topic often turned to the U.S and our presidential race. My typical reaction has been “Oy!” And they get it. It is interesting (wrong word….something stronger is needed but I cannot grab it) that they are fearful of Trump becoming president with comments along the order of “the most powerful country in the world cannot be in his hands.” Amen. Our additions to these conversations cite polls indicating that he would have to capture 70% of the white male vote to win….something that even Eisenhower was not able to do. The scary thought — unsaid — as this election cycle has been anything but normal and the polls unreliable.

We learned that Chile has an immigration problem similar to U.S. Chile is seen as the land of opportunity for many other South Americans. There has been a huge influx of Peruvians and Bolivians hoping to find work in the copper mines. Unfortunately for them, work in the mines is much more sophisticated than you’d imagine. To work there, a person must have completed a high school equivalent in a technical school. Also, the demand for copper has nose dived as the Chinese economy has stalled.  Cliff read this morning that the forecast is for copper prices to be depressed for another 2 years or so — a terrible thing for Chile since copper is its major economic driver. Wine accounts for less than 1% of its exports!!!  Drink more Chilean wine, people!

It is also interesting to pick up on comments that broadly stereotype various people. According to Chileans here in the Santiago area, Argentinians “hate them” because of various historical fights over geography. One guide went so far as to suggest it was dangerous for Chileans to visit Argentina. This feeling contrasts sooooo dramatically with the views in Patagonia where Argentina is considered “our neighbor” and where there is hardly any attention paid to national borders….you could be in and out of Chile with just a few steps and no one would care.

We were also told that Aregentina stopped issuing visas to Koreans because “we cannot tell them apart” — and, at least in this story, one passport could be used by dozens of Koreans to enter the country. One of our guides remarked that the other “problem” with Koreans is that they did not assimilate, preferring instead, to live in a small enclave near the Santiago market area.

Chile is, in our opinion, inching out of third world status. The copper market is a huge problem for them. Hopefully, tourism (and wine drinking!!) will help fill the gap. I am thinking that many people might consider South America — and especially Chile — a good vacation destination rather than violence plagued Europe. One of our guides said “25 years ago, who would think that he safest place in the world for tourists would be South America!” Agreed. Chile needs lots of infrastructure improvements, but the warmth of its people is reason enough to visit.

When we decided to loll about at the Hacienda Los Lingues, we canceled our original plans to visit Pablo Neruda’s seaside home, Isla Negra. We were able to get our tour guide for today to re-arrange things so that we got to see this home after all. Definitely worth it. First of all, the location is magnificent. Any place with crashing waves and miles of water at the horizon gets an A+ from both Cliff and me. Isla Negra delivers on both counts.

Then there is the home and its collection of odd, fantastic and completely fascinating collections ranging from ships in bottles, Japanese Noh and other clay masks, carved ships’  figureheads and angels, wooden replicas of Easter Island statues, Chilean embroidery, colored glass bottles, shoes, Mexican glassware, sets of china, antique French postcards, etc. etc. Not to mention the two Nubian statues that greet visitors in the entry-way, the life-size horse (with three tails!) in the “horse room” and the tuxedo he wore when he accepted the Nobel prize for literature. The Nobel prize itself is also on display. I’m missing a zillion other things. A captivating stop.

 Fish imagery abounds.I think Neruda got seasick!

The boat above was purchased and promptly (if not immediately) placed in the garden.

An interesting note for some of you….Neruda typically wrote in green pen and there are a dozen in a bowl on his favorite desk made from a salvaged ship’s door that he and Matilde retrieved from the waves at Isla Negra.

Onward to Valparaiso, a hill town (44 of them!) where nearly every inch of the territory seems to have a house, an apartment, condo or shanty erected on it. The colors are electric. Graffiti is everywhere with an occasional (and usually defaced) mural sprinkled here and there. We took the funicular — quite different from Santiago’s — up to an Italian-esque restaurant for lunch. We sat on a sunlit terrace under the shade of an umbrella and had a glorious view of the harbor. The Chilean Navy’s training sailboat was moored in view and at one point a teensy sailboat sailed into the scene, quite a contrast with the 4-masted sloop at the military dock. Valparaiso is a very busy port and its waterfront is not tourist friendly. Nice to look at, but nothing much for tourists to do there.

  

After touring various Valparaiso neighborhood’s (thankfully and gratefully by car), we traveled to Vina del Mar, a newer town located across the harbor. Our guide said it is known as the Miami of Cuba and there was definitely a comparison to be made. A casino dominates and it is filled, alas, with American fast food restaurants. We stopped to see An Easter Island stone sculpture that was sent to the city as a thank you for some sort of good deed, or more likely, money!

Last stop of the day was a wine tasting at an organic vineyard, Emiliana in Casablanca Valley. This is the Chilean area known for white wines and we tasted two — a Sauvignon blanc (pretty good, even to my dead tastebuds) an a Chardonnay which Cliff liked a lot. We also tasted a 100% Cabernet and a delicious red blend. We must have oohed an aahed in the right way because they ended up giving us a taste (albeit shared between the two of us) of their top of the line ($70-80 a bottle) red called Ge, and, yes, it was spectacular…but maybe not 7 times as spectacular as the red blend which I thought was pretty nifty.

Tomorrow is our last day. We’re both ready to get home, and have many terrific memories to bring there with us.

P.S. At dinner on our last night we spotted Flaherty wine on the list and, of course, ordered it. Just as delicious albeit not nearly as fun as drinking it at the winery with Jennifer!

 

A second day of wine touring. Today better than yesterday. And what contrast between the two wineries — the first called Flaherty! Definitely not Spanish. The second called Errazuriz….owned in part by the Rothchilds. Flaherty, very, very small. Errazuriz….very, very big. Much bigger than any of the vineyards we visited yesterday.

Ed Flaherty, in fact, once worked for Errazuriz. Today, he and his wife are enjoying the entreprenuerial pleasures (and pains) of establishing their own label. It started when he was working elsewhere and making his own wine as a “hobby” at home. Eventually, the success of their wine and his passion for it, led to them buying a piece of property an establishing a proper winery complete with tasting room, kitchen for preparing wine tasting luncheons, etc. etc. (And a cat and a dog.).

Cliff and I could totally relate to Ed and Jennifer (Jennifer gave us our tour.) Being an entrepreneur means that you put your whole heart and soul (and all of your $$) into the enterprise. This they have done. They came to Chile having met at Sonoma Cutrere. The came for “a harvest” and never left. Ed found that his winemaking skills were in great demand (and still are) and they made a life for themselves in Chile. They have children ages 14 and 17 and consider Chile their home. Their wine is spectacular. They make very little of it but do have a distributor in Flordia that we hope can connect us to some bottles.

Errazuriz is gorgeous. The main tasting rooms are in 100 year old buildings — very elegant and beautifully maintained. The production occurs in a modern building less than 50 yards away.  The architecture is fantastic — not quite as incredible as Lapostolle’s but still remarkable. The vineyard itself is much larger than Lapostolle and the garden areas are extensive.

Because there is much less traffic on Saturday, we arrived back at our hotel at a quite reasonable hour. After a nap (Cliff still has his cold!), we strolled through Lastarria area open air flea markets and settled on a Patagonian restaurant for dinner.  I had my first pisco sour — sort of like a cross between a margarita and a Ramos fizz.  Delicicious! A lovely, mild evening.

And, now, Cliff is watching March madness in Spanish!

An early start for the 2+ hour drive to Colchagua Valley. We visited two vineyards: Neyen Winery and Lapostolle. Neyen grows 5 different grapes on its property, but produces only one type of wine  — a blend of Carminerre and Cabernet.  The other grapes are taken to a “sister” winery. Neyen produces less than 75,000 bottles of wine a year and almost all of it is exported. Just 4% stays in Chile. Lapostolle, a much larger vineyard, produces about the same number of bottles and also limits its production to just one type of wine; theirs is a blend of Carminerre, Cabernet and Merlot. The other grapes are shipped to another winery where they make, among other wines, a Merlot that we found to be delicious. We bought a bottle of it to enjoy in our room. We learned that it is cheaper to buy these Chilean wines in the U.S. than it is to buy here in the country.

The Neyen Winery has a modern production facility and a gloriously old (1880s) building that is used to store the casks as the wine ages. The old Adobe building had undergone a major renovation in 2006 and as a result survived the 2010 earthquake in pretty good shape.

The Lapostolle winery, on the other hand, is housed in an incredible modern building that was dug into the granite. They had virtually no damage in 2010 other than a couple of bottles that broke in their wine store.  Lapostolle is owned by the French family that owns Grand Marnier. No expense was spared.

Both wines are completely handmade. The grapes are harvested by hand, they are de-stemmed by hand, women pick through the grapes and reject any shriveled grapes or grapes where the skin has been broken.  Neyen ferments its wine in the usual stainless steel containers and then ages the individual types of wine in French oak barrels. After a year, the wines are blended and bottled and aged for another year. Lapostolle ferments its wines in large French oaks vats. This process takes about 11 weeks. Then the individual wines are transferred to oak casks where they age for year. A that point, the winemaker decides on the blend and the wines are blended and re-introduced into the oak casks for another year of aging before bottling. (Yes, this is a very pricey wine!

Happily, the dreaded phylloxera is not a problem in Chile — so we didn’t have to hear about it every step of the way as we have in Napa!

Our tour guide at Lapostolle was nearly as charming as Giles from Robert Mondavi in Napa….but not quite:-)

We had a delicious (and need I say HUGE) lunch at a restaurant on the grounds of the Viu Manent vineyard, Rayeula. We’ll skip dinner and enjoy our Merlot tonight. Cliff is suffering from a horrible cold, so an early bedtime is a good idea.