Vino … Complicado

Posted by admin on October 15th, 2009 filed in language, travel

Before I finish my post on Valdivia, I have to tell you about a winery tour my sister and I took yesterday of Viña Cousiño Macul in Peñalolen (a suburb of Santiago).

According to the website, you can take the blue line from the Tobalaba station and get off at the Quilín station then walk east on Quilín for about 30 minutes.  For two relatively healthy girls on a beautiful day, we figured it’d be no problem, especially when we emerged from the station onto the parking lot of a gigantic outdoor mall.  With all the color and concrete, we expected to find subdivisions and sidewalks, moms with strollers and dogs with owners, but after we circumvented the huge home improvement portion of the mall, the development tapered off quickly.

Within two blocks of the mall the concrete sidewalk was swapped out from under us for a smooth, wide, level dirt path and within several blocks of that for a rocky path, then a bouldered, uneven, elevated path then a small landslide at which point we decided we’d need to call a cab for our return trip (if it’s difficult to navigate sober, it’ll probably be much worse when you’ve been drinking).

We arrived at the vineyard and met our tour guide (who had come in on his sick day to give us our tour since the other English speaking guide couldn’t make it), then headed off with tasting glasses in hand.

We had booked the earliest tour (which meant yes, we would be drinking before noon) and ended up having the guide to ourselves.  His English was very good but he had a funny habit of saying “It’s complicated” whenever he meant to describe a difficult, delicate, vague or proprietary process.  At first, the recurring response threw us since it didn’t quite fit our questions, but my sister and I caught onto the pattern at about the same time and got a little giggle out of every “Eets COMpleecated” thereafter.

He first took us to see the old, gigantic fermenting casks, which are no longer in use (the active equipment is all stainless steel):

We found out on the tour that according to the recorded date of it’s establishment it’s one of the oldest wineries in Chile, however, according to our guide, their vineyards are the oldest in the area.  Furthermore, it’s still a family owned operation (going on six generations or so).

He told us that in the late 80′s they started to notice that the increasing pollution from Santiago was altering the taste of the grapes, so they moved most of their vineyards and operations a little further out to an area called Buín where they process all their mainstream products.  Only two wines, the special blend (Finis Terrae) and the extra-special super-expensive blend (Lota) are still grown and processed in the original, pollution-blanketed winery.  Go figure.

He showed us the room with the stainless steel barrels where the grapes for Finis Terrae and Lota are hand selected (by old women with nimble fingers), partially pressed and fermented.  I asked what guides the grape selection process both at the time of harvest and just prior to pressing (“How do they know which grapes are the best?”), but the only answer he could give was, “It’s complicated.”  Ah. Of course.

We were then led to their room of relics which formerly served as the bottling room.  Prior to bottling, the wine had to be hand pumped through a filter (the red cylinder on the right):

and though originally everything was bottled by hand, eventually they bought a 6-slot bottling machine (which helped prevent the problems they were having with missing wine and tipsy bottling employees):

After the mini-museum tour, we headed to the cellar:

The foundation and lower 3 feet (or so) of the walls are of stone while the rest of the walls and the domes are of brick.  Everything was mortared together, interestingly enough, with egg whites.  Naturally, my immediate question was “What did they do with all of the yolks?”  He replied that there’s a saying that’s something along the lines of “cooking like a nun” which means cooking with egg yolks, so I guess they just donated the yolks to the convents. Or perhaps the whites were donated by the nuns?  Who knows?  It’s complicated.

At the end of the cellar pictured above, there is another, gated room which houses the family’s private collection.  Normally we would be able to peek in on the collection through the gates, but last week a visiting Brazilian decided to chuck a rock in between the bars and in doing so broke two of the family’s bottles.  Our guide didn’t tell us what they were valued at, but he did say that both bottles were of an older French reserve.  The family must have been pretty livid because these normally laidback employers threatened that they would fire any guide who let their tourists near the gates.  Why the Brazilian was urged to throw a rock at a practically priceless, incredibly fragile collection, I don’t know.  Just because Brazilians are beautiful and speak Portuguese, they think they can get away with everything… and sometimes they do! It’s complicated.

While in the cellar, we sampled one of their varietal wines – Gris – which starts as a Cabernet Sauvignon but is separated from the skins after 40 minutes into fermentation.  It comes out a copper color, but is technically a Rosé. The first sip was a vividly interesting taste, completely different than what I’m used to, and the rest of glass was delicious so later we picked up two bottles (at about $4 a bottle).  We drank one yesterday evening during a homemade fish tacos night (more to come on the tacos in the Valdivia post) and look forward to enjoying the next one soon (but not before classes – it’s complicated).

We also sampled a (you guessed it) complex Cabernet Sauvignon but couldn’t afford to bring it home.  Meanwhile, our guide had offered to take a picture of us.  We stood for it, then he asked if we wanted a black and white photo as well murmuring something about how the job sometime gets boring and how he likes to mix it up occasionally.  It’s complicated.

Having had more wine than food in the first half of our day (breakfast was just a bowl of oatmeal around 8 in the morning), we staggered a bit while leaving the vineyard a little after noon.

Lucikly, my sister realized we were less than a block from a major street and a bus route that would take us directly back to where we needed to be in Santiago, saving us from having to retrace our steps or catch a cab to the metro stop.  She’s a smart one!