PUENTE ALTO, Chile – Almaviva is almost self-explanatory.

A must in all lists of the best Chilean cabernet sauvignons, this red wine was born from the joint venture between the French group Baron Philippe de Rothschild (known for Château Mouton Rothschild, one of Bordeaux’s premier cru) and Concha y Toro, the largest Chilean wine group.

Almaviva was the first foreign label to be commercialized at the Place de Bordeaux, the virtual space where French wine merchants sell their great wines, back in the 1998 harvest. Its winery here in Puente Alto, near Santiago, has won awards for an architectural project that interacts with the landscape.

With so much recognition, the winery deserved a top-notch wine tourism experience. From its inauguration in 2000 until it was closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Viña Almaviva welcomed groups for scheduled tastings. Tourists passing by could buy the Epu, a red wine inspired by the Bordelais concept of having a second wine, made with grapes from younger vineyards.

The focus on wine tourism only gained strength recently. It was included in the winery’s expansion plan, whose works were completed at the end of last year, and assumed its definitive form now in the second semester.

There are three tours, tailored for wine lovers. The first includes a tasting of Almaviva 2020 and Epu 2019 for $125. In the second, for $190, you can taste two vintages, 2019 and 2020, as well as the 2019 Epu. And the vertical tour, for $275, brings the 2019, 2020, and 2021 vintages of this iconic wine, as well as the 2019 Epu.

In addition to the tasting, the attraction is getting to know the winery, famous for its undulating roof integrated with the Andes mountain range landscape, not far from there.

At first glance, the renovation kept the entire structure of the building, but in reality, a second roof was added over the previous one, maintaining its characteristic design to allow for expansion.

The visit starts off surprisingly.

After passing through the barrel rooms, the tourist is invited to go through a wooden door, almost imperceptible in a huge corridor, that leads to the world of wine tourism.

In a new underground floor, there is a space entirely dedicated to telling the story of Almaviva. It begins with a short film about the wine, displayed in a small room with old Chilean cinema chairs.

Next, the tourist is invited to tour the various facilities, with audiovisual resources explaining the winemaking process. In the end, there is a huge cellar, with the vintages highlighted, and the tourist returns to the surface in a panoramic elevator that reveals the various layers of soil that make up the Puente Alto terroir.

But it wasn’t just the need to focus on wine tourism that motivated the renovation. On the technical side, French winemaker Michel Friou gained more space and more oak barrels. It was an old request of his to achieve a slower aging process for both red wines, Almaviva and Epu, which received a new label design reminiscent of the main wine.

An example is the Almaviva 2022, presented earlier this month in Brazil and expected to hit the market in mid-next year, still without a defined price – the 2020 vintage, for example, is sold for R$ 3,490 at World Wine. The red wine is made with cabernet sauvignon (responsible for 72% of the blend) and carmenere (23%). Cabernet franc (4%) and petit verdot (1%) complement the blend. The red wine matures for 20 months in oak barrels, 70% of them new.

In the tasting in Brazil, the red wine proved to be very young, needing time in the bottle. And as the differences are in the details, it shows a wine with fruit and power slightly higher than that perceived in 2021.

“This is a slightly warmer year than 2021,” explains Friou. And the heat, when ripening the grapes, makes a difference, resulting in a more exuberant red wine with good notes from international critics – on a scale of up to 100 points, it received 96 from Matthew Luczy for The Wine Advocate, and 99 from James Suckling.


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