Chile is very, very good at exporting wine.
It vies with Australia as the world’s fifth biggest wine producer after Italy, France, Spain and the US but is decisively the fourth biggest exporter, being much more successful than Australia. It has overtaken Australia in the burgeoning Chinese wine market after negotiating a free-trade agreement with the Chinese. Having its wines enter China free of any taxes or duties since 2015 ensured that Chile became the second biggest supplier of wine to China after France when Australian wine was effectively barred from China by punitive tariffs from 2021 to 2024. It’s difficult to see how Australia will regain what was once its most important export market now that Chile has established such a strong position there.
In 2023 Chile suffered an unusually small harvest and ended up sending more wine to China than to either of its traditional prime export markets, the UK and the US – although the UK was back as Chile’s most enthusiastic wine importer last year.
While Americans have tended to view wine from Chile as necessarily cheap and cheerful (although this may be changing since the influential Wine Spectator chose Don Melchor 2021 as its wine of the year last year), Chile has long had numerous, well-informed champions in the UK. One of the first was Master of Wine Peter Richards, who now hosts the popular podcast Wine Blast with his wife, fellow Master of Wine Susie Barrie.
At the end of last year the couple organised a tasting in London of 53 of their Chile Wines of the Year, about half of those selected during two days’ tasting at their home in Winchester from the wines already available in the UK and wines from producers wanting to export there. Although this was obviously not an exhaustive showing of the country’s finest wines, there was a big crowd of trade buyers, and many a naughty heavy bottle.
Perhaps not surprisingly, red wines dominated: 35 of the wines in the tasting were red. There were no sparkling wines and only one, slightly superannuated, rosé, although those two categories are rare bright spots in a depressed global wine market. And, again no surprise, of the reds it was the 13 Cabernets and Cabernet blends that shone out, even if I awarded a GV for good value to only one of them, El Principal’s 2022 Memorias blend of 74% Cabernet Sauvignon, 16% Petit Verdot and 10% Cabernet Franc from Pirque (for which Wine-Searcher lists only one retailer, in Brazil).
Wine districts such as Pirque close to the capital Santiago are especially good at growing Cabernet, thanks to gravel deposits from the River Maipo, cooling breezes and the proximity of the Andes. Puente Alto between the expanding suburbs and the mountains is the Pauillac of Chile.
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