The good neighbourhood wines of Viña Errázuriz
By John Schreiner
October 17, 2005
The way to live in a good neighbourhood when you are on a budget is to identify the best street you can afford, and then buy the smallest house.
The equivalent to that in wine is the 2003 Max Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon from Viña Errázuriz, one of Chile’s leading wineries. This beautifully balanced red, with elegant, silky tannins and delicious flavours of plum and cassis, comes from a winery whose offerings also include wines at $50 to $100 a bottle.
Max Reserva is an absolute bargain at $20 a bottle. It is an affordable wine with a very fine pedigree.
This wine, along with the stars from the Errázuriz high-rent neighbourhood, have been previewed at recent Canadian tastings by Eduardo Chadwick, the current scion of the family that founded Errázuriz. A suave 46-year-old, Chadwick also has a fine pedigree.
The Errázuriz side of his family originated in the Basque region of Spain. One of Chadwick’s ancestors, Dom Maximiano Errázuriz, started a vineyard and winery in 1870 in the Aconcagua Valley, about 200 kilometres north of Chile. The valley shares its name with the Aconcagua Mountain, the highest in the Americas at just over 7,000 metres. Edward Chadwick has climbed it. And he still runs the historic winery.
The Chadwicks boast of a genealogy reaching back at least to the Normans who conquered England in 1066. The winery’s fact sheet says that the family “were descended from the Archbishop of Rheims.” Obviously, clerical celibacy was not strictly observed in those days. It was Thomas Chadwick, a mining engineer, who went to Chile in 1820, where he prospered. His grandson married a niece of Dom Maximiano. The son of that marriage became Don Alfonso Chadwick Errázuriz. Don Alfonso took over the wine business and brought his son, Eduardo, into it in 1982.
It would not have been a great time to be in the Chilean wine business. The Chilean economy had been run into the ditch by the Allende government (which actually took over some wineries and broke up some vineyards). Chilean wineries suffered from lack of investment and lack of markets. According to Eduardo Chadwick, the turnaround began about 1990 with the restoration of Chile’s democracy and the country’s reputation in the world.
The turnaround has been huge. Well over US$1 billion has been invested in vineyards and wineries. There has been a substantial increase in the number of wineries and in the volume of wine exports. Because they needed a better image in the world, the Chileans levered their greatest advantage -- some of the globe’s best grape-growing terroir – by attracting big-name partners into joint ventures.
Chadwick’s partner was Robert Mondavi of California. Eduardo, who took over as the Viña Errázuriz president in 1993, formed a partnership two years later with Mondavi to grow a super-premium red called Seña, with a vineyard of its own in the Aconcagua Valley (although top grapes from other of the company’s vineyards also have been used). Since 2004, the Seña project has been owned 100% by Viña Errázuriz.
This is a Cabernet Sauvignon-dominated blend selling for $90-$100 (when it is available). The current vintage is from 2001. The style of the wine is more Bordeaux (cedar, cassis, firm structure) than California and that is not surprising since the benchmarks for Viña Errázuriz, and its markets, are in Europe. In a famous 2004 tasting in Berlin, this vintage came in second, ranking ahead of Château Lafite 2000 and Châteaux Margaux 2001.
Number one was also a Chadwick wine. A super-premium winery called Viñedo Chadwick has been established at the Chadwick family’s home south of Santiago. From a vineyard planted in 1992 on a former polo field (Don Alfonso’s passion), a wine bearing the Chadwick name is made, beginning with the 1999 vintage. In the Berlin tasting, the winner was the 2000 vintage of Viñedo Chadwick, even outscoring Seña.
The polished 2002 Viñedo Chadwick is listed in British Columbia at $80 a bottle, a bargain compared to those French wines that ranked behind it. Unfortunately, only 90 bottles of this wine have been allocated to this market.
It might be easier to get the veteran star of the Errázuriz stable, the 2000 vintage of Don Maximiano Founder’s Reserve, also made with Cabernet Sauvignon. It has been in the market for several years and currently sells for $72. For my palate, the quality of these three premium reds is remarkably close.
Eduardo Chadwick also imported the first Shiraz vines to Chile. With fruit from these vines, Viña Errázuriz is now making a Shiraz called La Cumbre, which sells in British Columbia for $55 a bottle, when available. Chadwick showed off the 2003 vintage of La Cumbre, a superbly crafted wine with depth and balance.
Most may never get a chance to buy these exceptional wines. The good news is that these top wines seem to have stamped a standard of quality on the entire family of wines from Errázuriz, judging from the $20 Max Reserva or the Errázuriz Wild Ferment Chardonnay ($22). These are good houses in a grand neighbourhood.
goodgrog@shaw.ca
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