Malcolm Jolley: Whether it costs $20 or $200, wine has never been better—here’s why

To my ear, the Spanish word “investigación” sounds both more lyrical and deliberative than its English counterpart, “research.” Or so I thought as I stood in front of the Centro de Investigación e Innovación (CII). The centre was built a decade ago by the large Chilean wine concern Concha y Toro near one of their Maule Valley winey, about 250 kilometres southwest of Santiago.

As part of a recent press trip hosted by Wines of Chile, I was given a tour of the Centre for Research and Innovation by its director, Dr. Álavaro González who leads a team of 10 other PhDs. In the laboratory building the investigators use a variety of state-of-the-art machines to study the grapes and wines on a molecular level. Adjacent to the Molecular Biology Laboratory is an experimental winery and a nursery vineyard.

When he’s not slicing up DNA, or whatever it is exactly Dr. González is up to in the lab, he’s making wine in the CII winery. There, I was less blinded by science and more enchanted by what looked like a miniature, almost LEGOLAND, version of a commercial winery. There were rows upon rows of small-scale stainless steel fermenting tanks, each holding a small variation of a given wine. Even science is fun when wine is involved.

My press colleagues and I did not get to taste from Dr, González’s small stainless steel tanks. Instead, we were handed over to winemaker Rodrigo Alonzo who led us to an auditorium-sized tasting room, with rows of seats and desks with sinks for spitting. Alonzo works on Concha y Toro’s luxury brands and he led us through a tasting of what the company considers their more prestigious labels, including two vintages (2021 and 2022) of their top-scoring “Icon Wine” Don Melchor, which retails for about $200 when makes it to Canada. (It’s delicious.)

The lab and experimental winery visits were interesting, and the luxury wines were luxurious, and there was more wine to taste at a light supper we were served in yet another part of the Centre for Research and Innovation facility. When it was done, riding in the van to our hotel in nearby Talca, I wondered why Wines of Chile and Concha y Toro hosted us there.

Why, I wondered, didn’t they receive us at one of Concha y Toro’s luxury wines, set up for wine tourism? Surely that’s the story they’d hoped we would write about when we got back to Canada? Only later, when I went back to my notes from the presentation Álavaro González gave us before our tour, did I figure it out.

The CII is not just the private laboratory and research centre for Viñas Concha y Toro, it’s part of a national university research network in Chile. It also partners internationally with universities and private research bodies. It works in five general categories of search: consumers and products, smart[er] wine industry, genetic resources and plant health, climate change and wine quality, and sustainability and circularity.

Concha y Toro is the biggest winery (or network of wineries) in Chile and one of the biggest wine-making companies in the world. The point was to show us how it, and by extension, the Wines of Chile as a whole, fit into the literal world of wine. The work of the researchers at the CII could be as local as developing strategies for coping with climate change in the Maule Valley. Or, it could be as global as developing artificial intelligence to model consumer tastes in Canada.

Dr. González’ work came to mind after I ran into a couple of my neighbours last Saturday. They are two dads, whose kids went to the local elementary school with mine and they looked like they were having a good time in the middle of a civilized lunch at the bar of the restaurant, with a bottle of wine between them and plates of pizza and salad.

They asked me what I thought of the wine, a Primitivo from Puglia in the very South of Italy. I replied I had had it before and thought it was good and offered some kind of trivia about it, like that Primitivo and Zinfandel were found out to be the same grape with the advent of DNA testing. Then, I was asked if there were any wine regions I had my eye on recently.

I replied that since I had just got back from Chile, those wines were on the forefront of my mind and that they offer particularly good value if you can find them at the price point just above the supermarket level of $20 to $30. If you’re looking for an alternative to some of the more popular Californian brands, Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, in particular, is almost uniformly well made: always with a ripe fruit character, but with less sugar and more freshness.

Then, I took a pause, and I said something like, “You know, they’re making good wines everywhere now, there are no more secrets.”

There is still bad, or not as well-made wine, out there, but the information and basic tools required to grow and make balanced, palate-pleasing wine without obvious faults are widespread and enthusiastically adopted around the world. The effect of the information revolution can be tasted. It’s never been better.

The CII at Concha y Toro in the Maule Valley might be closer to the bleeding edge than most of the information gathering going on about winemaking. But it’s very much part of a quiet but revolutionary global process of improvement that has affected the quality of wine whether it costs $12, $20, or $200 a bottle.

The day after we visited Concha y Toro and the CII we drove from Talca over 500 kilometres further south to the Iata Valley to see Leo Erazo and his organic hilltop winery in view of the Pacific Ocean. (I wrote about our visit in my January 25 column.) Erazo’s winery is a bit of a laboratory too.

Next to the clay amphoras, some of which were more than 100 years old, I saw a row of the small stainless steel tanks I had seen in the experimental winery at Concha y Toro. Erazo buys grapes from local farming families, who often have small plots, planted long ago as part of a system of mixed agriculture. He vinifies them in the small tanks to gauge the difference between the sites, probing and gathering information with every vintage.

¡Viva la investigación!