A Taste of Success

By Tim Padgett/Colchagua Valley

For Generation-X imbibers, the perfect wine combines Bordeaux quality with Boone's Farm prices--and don't forget the hip label design. Which is why Laura Hartwig may become a very popular woman. She's the matron--and the face on the label--of the three-year-old Santa Laura winery in Chile's Colchagua Valley. The vineyard's Cabernet Sauvignons are full of lavish spice and berry flavors, with pleasant touches of vanilla and chocolate, all for just $10 a bottle. Chilean wines like Hartwig's are in demand at Wine Brats, a Gen-X club in Santa Rosa, Calif. "If we think the best wine is even $5, we'll buy it," says Joel Quigley, the club's head. "The Chileans are giving us the kind of price-quality ratio we're looking for."

In the competition for international wine drinkers, Chile has made its mark by offering decent wine at low prices. The country's wine exports have soared from $50 million in 1990 to half a billion dollars this year. Chile is now the third leading wine exporter to the U.S., behind France and Italy, and its giant Concha y Toro winery, in the Maipo Valley, is America's No. 2 imported brand.

Yet wines from Chile--whose climate, soil and cheap labor are a viticulturist's paradise--are finally adding vintage to value, in the way that California wines did two decades ago. Chilean Cabernets, especially, are "softer than California and yet more accessible than Bordeaux," says Wine Spectator senior editor Thomas Matthews. "If this keeps up, Chile could be, sooner than many expected, something more than a perennial wine bridesmaid." Even British wine author Auberon Waugh--whose novelist father Evelyn Waugh considered New World wine an oxymoron--gushes over a collection of 1996 and '97 reds from the Montes winery in Chile's Curico Valley. Chilean wines, he says, "are showing magnificent and rich concentration, but also subtlety and changing flavors."

What's more, Chile is making its first forays into the top echelons of the wine marketplace. Early this month, Concha y Toro, in collaboration with France's Chateau Mouton Rothschild, unveiled Chile's first ultra-premium red wine, a $70 Cabernet-Merlot varietal called Almaviva. It is intended to be Chile's equivalent of a premier grand cru classe Bordeaux.

Chile's new wine boom has been sparked by an upsurge in boutique vineyards like Santa Laura. Unlike many traditional Chilean winemakers, the Hartwig family, which runs the winery, disdains exaggerated harvests that compromise grape quality and makes earnest use of stainless-steel vat technology. The Hartwigs also take more care than is usual in Chile to master their terroir--making soil, climate and grape work in richer harmony. Similar attention is being paid in other newer wineries like MontGras, Carmen and Veramonte, which is bottling Chile's hot new grape, a Merlot cousin called Camenere.

And they've done it while keeping prices low. "California seems to assume people only want a Mercedes from quality wine," says Santa Laura manager Alejandro Hartwig Jr. "This doesn't have to be an elitist commodity." The question is whether that attitude will change--and spoil the original lure of Chilean wines. "I almost hate to praise them," says Waugh. "I'm afraid it will drive their prices up."

--By Tim Padgett/Colchagua Valley