At the Salón Verde restaurant in Pullay, about 450 kilometres southwest of the capital Santiago, I had to put on my jacket when we sat down to lunch on the terrace. The restuarant overlooks the crashing waves of the Pacific on the beach across the road. It was chilly in Chile, even though it was mid-January (the height of the Southern Hemisphere summer) in just a t-shirt I had piel de gallina: chicken skin, or goose pimples.
Bueno, it wasn’t that chilly. My jacket was made of cotton. And if you got out of the breeze from the cold ocean water, on that cloudless sunny day it would have been close to 30 Celsius. But, like a lot of Chile, when the winds blow, they blow cool. And cool winds combined with clear sunlight are wine grapes’ good friend. Sunlight ripens the fruit and the breeze keeps acidity.
I was in Chile with a group of a half dozen Canadian wine journalists brought there and hosted by Wines of Chile. We had a van and a driver and we covered as much ground as we could in a week, running up and down the middle of the slender country at the tip of South America. We zig-zagged between the foothills of the mighty snow-capped Andes, the Central Valley to its west, and the Coastal Mountains further to the west until we hit the coast.
Before lunch in Pullay, we caught those breezes about 500 metres high and five kilometres east in the hills of Itata at the winery of Leonardo Erazo. Erazo is a new-wave Chilean winemaker in a remote region known more for its forestry than viticulture. Among the intensely planted stands of red pine and eucalyptus, Erazo finds old vine, organically grown plantations of Cinsault and Païs, and his own Chenin Blanc.
Leo, as everyone calls Erazo, on his wholly self-sufficient and remote farm, is off the grid and a bit off the wall. The concept of terroir argues that wines ought to taste like the place they come from. An expansive view extends that notion to say they taste like the person who makes them.
Erazo’s wines are charming, built for modern (light and fruit-forward) tastes, while deeply rooted in Chilean winemaking tradition. Among the equipment in his half-barn, half-artists’ studio winery is clay amphora he salvaged that date back to colonial times. His growers tend to small plots of old vines planted generations ago.
A long way away from Itata, closer to Santiago, is the Casa Real estate of Viña Santa Rita, a Chilean wine brand most Canadian wine drinkers would recognize. The estate is over 10,000 acres big, with about 10 percent of that under vine. Stretching up into the Andes foothills, some of the vineyards here sit at an elevation of close to 1,000 metres.

Leo Erazo in the vineyards at Santa Rita. Credit: Malcolm Jolley.
Casa Real is a sprawling 19th-century Spanish colonial-style house, enclosing a couple of courtyards, and replete with its own chapel and large park in the style of an English garden. Cooled by breezes from the Andess which it abuts and the coast which travel eastwards up the Maipo River Valley, Casa Real was the summer estate of the Fernández Concha family. Now, it’s a fancy hotel and restaurant, though the working wineries of the estate are not far from the luxurious hospitality area.
Sebastían Labbé has been making wine on the Santa Rita estate for 20 years. Presently he is in charge of the company’s “Ultra Premium Wines.” The Casa Real Reserva Especial Cabernet Sauvignon is a serious wine, far elevated from the entry-level affordable wines that Santa Rita exports in great volume. The Casa Real is what the Chileans refer to as an “icon wine,” a kind of elite club of purpose-built reds, usually dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon.
Labbé took us through a tasting of the 2022 Casa Real Cabernet and then the 2021 and a 2012. The wines were made, he explained to a house style, and the reference was Médoc. Indeed, the wines showed a Claret characteristic and showed black currant, violet, and cedar notes, to varying degrees.
The 2022 was more open and generous (though still gripping in tannin), the 2021 more reserved and brooding, but perhaps hinting at interesting things to come. The 2012 was just a pleasure to hold in the mouth. There was not a lot of spitting going on and quite a bit of nodding heads when Labbé told us the wines would be following us to the dining room later.
Before dinner at Santa Rita that evening, we met Teresita Ovalle who makes the Floresta label wines for Santa Rita at the estate. Ovalle was named Best Young Winemaker of the Year by the Mesa de Cata La CAV 2025 guide. If the Casa Real wines draw on the traditions of mid-19th century Chilean estate wines, then her wines show the promise of modern technique and tastes in the 21st.
Above the main Santa Rita range, but still accessible, the Floresta range runs towards affordable luxury, generally priced between $25 and $30 when they appear in Canada. In this case, the stand out was Ovalle’s 2022 Chardonnay, which showed a nervy freshness and a quality of salinity over green apple fruit. It had all the characteristics of a cool-climate Chardonnay.
The Floresta Chardonnay is made from vineyards in the Limari DO, more than 300 kilometres north of Santiago. This should be a warmer part of the country, moving towards the Atacama desert. How can it make fresh wines like the Chardonnay, or the Sauvignon Blanc I had at dinner the night before, I wondered.
The answer turns out to be the Camanchaca, a particularly dense fog that comes up off the cold Pacific and settles in the Limari Valley before it’s eventually burned off by the sun, or blown off by the wind. If the breeze alone was enough to make me reach for my jacket at Pulla, imagine the cooling effect of the fog lifted out of the cold waters of the Humboldt Current.
I visited a dozen wineries in Chile, and tasted wines from a score more. Each had an interesting and tasty story to tell about that country’s evolution as a winemaking force. Watch this space for more to come about Chilean wines. I haven’t even begun to describe the food that went with them.