Sip Sip Sip!

My love affair with wine began with a few flirtatious sips while living in the Czech Republic. You see it was there that I went to my first wine tasting in the Moravian castle of Melnik where there was a vineyard on the premises. My memory is a bit hazy seeing that this was more than 15 years ago and, let´s face it, I got quite inebriated, but I do recall drinking white wine and discovering that I preferred my white wine dry, not sweet. Since then I've become partial to red wine but I'm not precisely sure how/when I swerved into the Cabernet/Shiraz lane. It might have occurred as a result of an accumulation of late nights partying while conversing about politics in Abu Dhabi. Hmmm....

As I made my way through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, I found myself eagerly looking forward to coming to a country which not only produces a lot of halfway decent wine, but at a price that doesn't make me weep when I get my credit card bill. Which brings me to Chile and the wine-producing Curico Valley...

I'd meant to visit one of the numerous wineries near Santiago but things hadn't worked out that way due to my unexpected motorcycle (diaries) jaunt with Mr. Helmut Mohawk. So in planning my route southwards to the Chilean Lake District, it was personally imperative that I stop over for at least a day at a town which possessed a vineyard I could visit. Thanks to my Lonely Planet
guidebook, I decided to visit Curico due to the proximity of the Miguel Torres winery AND the
fact that it supposedly had a picture-perfect Plaza de Armas. As it turned out though, the main
square drew a huge ho-hum from yours truly but the vineyard was, indeed, delectable!
To get to the winery, I had to hop on a microbus headed towards the town of Molina and then walk for a brief stretch alongside the busy highway. The Miguel Torres tours, I'd been informed via
email, started every hour on the hour and cost either 6000 or 9000 pesos depending on whether you chose to taste from the Santa Digna or Cordillera collection. Unfortunately, due to my bus from Santiago arriving late in Curico, I arrived at the winery at 2:10, ten minutes later than the tour was scheduled to start. However, seeing that there was no one else doing the tour and once I'd explained the fact that the ONLY reason I'd come to Curico AT ALL was just to tour their facility, they agreed to start the tour late. Furthermore, they also agreed to let me taste their red wines exclusively and charged me the lesser cost while allowing me to taste from their better Cordillera collection! Sincere flattery does work upon occasion.

So what, if anything, did I learn from my winery visit? Well dear readers, I learned that the reason red wine is...well...RED....is due to the fact that the skin of the grape is left intact whereas it is removed during the production of white wine. Rudimentary knowledge perhaps, but complete news to me! I also learned that red wine takes longer to produce for it has to sit and soak in a vat for an additional few weeks or so. Finally, I learned a bit more about the curious case of the Carminere grape. You see, apparently, it was long believed that this particular grape had been fully wiped out due to a locus fly plague in the 19th century. However, back in the early 1990's, a French professor who had been puzzled as to why the Merlot wines exported from certain areas of Chile had such an unusual taste, discovered upon closer inspection that it was due to the existence of these Carminere grapes being inadvertently mixed into the Merlot. Once it was known that these grapes still grew in Chile, they once again began producing these wines. Frankly, having now tasted it, a Carminere wine ain´t too shabby, although I still prefer Cabernet Sauvignon.

At the conclusion of the tour, I decided to purchase a bottle, one of the fine Cordillera
range. Perhaps all along, they realized that by allowing my palate to taste their finer wines, I would be unable to resist splurging on one of them. Clever, clever! Thus ended my vino veritas excursion to Curico.

On my way to the bus station which would allow me to hightail it out of town, I heard the braying sounds of a little girl, roughly 10 years of age, singing along to Justin Bieber's "Baby, Baby". Oh the inhumanity of it all!

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