We go for some carmenère tasting and fine dining in Chile’s Colcugua Valley.
For our second wine tasting session (the first was back in Mendoza in Argentina) we hired a car rather than doing a day tour. Our hire car pick up was in Talca (Europcar) so the day before we took a bus there from Pucon. It was a long and hot drive with Condor – this was our first bus without any air conditioning and we were in the front seats with the sun streaming through the window. It was also the first bus where someone came around with a menu to ask us what we’d like to order. Then 30 minutes before we arrive in Talca (running an hour late) we stop at a fast food restaurant beside the road and the waitress gets on board with trays of burgers. Of course we hadn’t ordered anything, so we just had to wait patiently while everyone else ate. Just when we thought we’d got the bus system sussed…
So eventually we arrive in Talca, and because the bus station (and hire car pick up) is quite far from the downtown area, I booked Kim a hotel I know he’ll love – a hotel inside the bus station. I grew quite fond of the lady doing the departure announcements. We actually slept pretty well and the next morning we collected the car and headed on a 2-hour drive to our new home for the next 2 nights, which was Alto Yaquil Refugio, a little cabin (cabaña) just outside the town of Santa Cruz in the Colchagua Valley. We drove through the town on the way – it looked ok but when we arrived at our accommodation we were very happy with our choice. It was up a dirt track (it wouldn’t be us if there wasn’t a dirt track involved) and had wonderful views over the valley, horses in the fields below and sheep roaming around. Given that there was an outdoor kitchen with BBQ, we made a beeline for the supermarket to get groceries for the next 2 nights. Once night had fallen, the whole sky was scattered with stars.
Our one and only event for the next day was a visit to Viña Montes, a 30-minute drive from our cabaña. I’d booked (online) a table at their Fuego de Apalta restaurant a couple of days in advance. Our guess was that if you book you get the best table which is on a little ‘pontoon’ actually in the vines. It was a special treat (that translates to ‘we didn’t put the cost on the budgeting spreadsheet’) but it was well worth it. In terms of setting and experience, it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had.
After lining our stomachs we took a tour of the vineyard. I’d also booked this a couple of days in advance online. We were the only ones who had so it ended up being a private tour and we started by getting into a little truck and being driven around the vines accompanied by the usual history of the vineyard info from the tour guide. Next we went up to the top floor of the main building and saw where women (only women, apparently) select the grapes which will make it through to the next round. What sets Viña Montes apart is that they drop their grapes from a great height down a tube letting gravity do the crushing. This is to avoid crushing the seeds and giving the wine a bitter taste. Our last stop was the cellar where they play Gregorian chant music to the barrels 24/7. Obviously. And then we had a tasting of 4 different wines. Because we mentioned that we’d already tried one at lunch, our tour guide also brought us a small taste of the most expensive wine they have – the Purple Angel. This is in the top 1% of wines in the world and supposedly costs 70 euros a bottle. Now, we never saw the bottle, or her pour it, so we only have her word for it…
Comparing our Argentine wine tasting day with the Chilean one, I much preferred Chile as the setting of Viña Montes is really stunning. Hiring the car allowed us to stay somewhere beautiful in the countryside rather than a budget city hotel, to spend as long as we liked at the winery, and it all worked out to be a lot cheaper than it would have been if we’d have booked a day tour either from Santa Cruz or Santiago. After a day and half in the wine region, we took the car onto the Altos de Lircay, a national park around 70km east of Talca.