Tag: Maipo Valley

Here we have Chile’s Santa Ema winery telling us about their history and the wines they will be pouring at the Vancouver International Wine Festival. Enjoy. About Santa Ema With over 60 years of professional experience, Santa Ema are pioneers in the Maipo Valley where they are always searching for the best expressions of terroir, from the mountains to the coast….

My first and only dinner during the Vancouver Wine Festival 2022 was the “Icons of South America” held at Alouette Bistro. Classic French cuisine with a West Coast twist meets powerhouse wines from Chile. Wines from Viñedo Chadwick, Seña, and Arboleda wines, from the vineyards in the Aconcagua Valley and Maipo Valley, were paired with the following dishes prepared by…

One thing that I learned from my time being a part of the South World Wine Society many years ago was that Chile produces many premium wines, but at the time the entry-level wines were only making it into BC liquor stores.  Things slowly change and you can now find more premium Chilean wines, usually from Cabernet Sauvignon, which is…

With the lockdown on travel due to COVID-19, I thought I’d look back at some of my trips to wine regions around the world.  One of my memorable trips was to Chile in October 2009 where I toured around Santiago, the capital, then rented a driver with a car to take me the coastal city of Valparaiso and some wineries…

Chile, eventhough it has been making wine since the 1500’s, still holds surprises.  One more recent surprise was that some of the Merlot grapes that they thought they were growing was actually the Bordeaux variety, Carmenere; a grape that was long forgotten in Bordeaux as it was too difficult to ripen.  Carmenere and Merlot look very similar but ripen differently. …

Vineyards surround Chile’s capital of Santiago. In the 19th century, Santiago’s rich moved to the valley around Santiago to try their hand as a landowner. They planted vineyards and built large estates. Despite Santiago’s growth and rapid consumption of arable land the Maipo Valley still thrives. It lies between the Andes and the coastal mountains, which keep the climate dry…

Chile is a fascinating country, with climate and terrain that vary from the Atacama desert in the north to glaciers in Patagonia to the south, and everything in between!  From Wikipedia I learned that by surface 80% of South America’s glaciers lie in Chile.  Then there are the Andes Mountains, which controls/modifies the weather coming in from the Pacific Ocean.  With…