Day 1 Morning: We first visited the Clos Apalta Winery and did their standard Tour and Tasting. The facility and surroundings are beautiful and the tour was very professional, but pretty dry. A tasting of 3 wines including their icon Clos Apalta (Carmenere/Cab/Merlot - 5200 Cases) which retailed for about $150 at the winery. It drank well, but I would never pay that much, knowing how much Right Bankis out there for less $. The other wines from their Lapostolle label were good. Overall, I’d recommend the tour and tasting. Especially the experience in their amazing tasting room in the middle of their barrel room.
Day 1 Afternoon: We then drove about 3 minutes to Montes to do their tour and tasting. We did not do the premium tasting, but did one which was supposed to pour 1 of their premium wines. However, it looks like they recently changed that particular tasting as the “premium” that they poured was only a Montes Alpha. The wines were disappointing, and the tour matched. We did book an outside table on the terrace of Fuegos de Apalta, which is Francis Mallman’s restaurant in Chile. The lunch experience made up for the sub-par winery visit. We both had an excellent porchetta and ordered a 2001 Montes Cab. Expensive but worth it.
Day 2: The Colchagua Valley was having their Annual Wine Festival and today was the kick-off. The festival and atmosphere around the square was fun, however I would never recommend anyone to visit specifically for this festival. I could write 5 paragraphs on how badly run and setup this was, so I’ll stick to the most obvious. There were tents for over 20 wineries setup around the square, however, any wine that sold for over $15 was considered “premium” and had a small area dedicated for only these wines. 1) You had young kids pouring all the premium wines, meaning that they had no connection to the winery and no specific knowledge of the wines. On 2 occasions, they tried to pour the wrong wine 2)It was so crowded, the atmosphere around the premium wines was ruined. You had to fight to get a pour like a crowded bar. 3) The non-premium tents had few people around them and workers employed by that specific winery. So these were the people that should have poured and spoke about their own premium wines and it had an atmosphere fitting for drinking. 4) It was insanely expensive to drink the real premium wines and made no sense financially.
Day 3: Day from Hell. While driving from Santa Cruz to Lo Abarca, we got a flat. The spare inside the trunk was already flat. No one from Europcar was answering the phone, and when they did the service was horrendous. It actually took over 5 hours for them to tow us. Luckily we were only about 25 km from the Casa Marin Winery, so they dropped us off there. We ended up missing our tour and tasting at Casa Marin for that day. When we asked them to reschedule us for the next day, they gave the excuse that they had a huge group coming in and they couldn’t help us. This was a little shocking for us, seeing that we spent about $200 on one of their vineyard villas for the night. We informed them throughout the day about our car troubles, so we didn’t exactly stand them up. The cold greeting and flat out refusal for a tour and tasting the following day left us really confused. The next day when the Europcar dropped the new car off for us, we saw the “large group”, and it looked like a tour group from one of the cruises.
Day 4: Beach day on the coast. We went to Isla Negra and Algarrobo. Flooded with Chilean tourists up and down the coast area. It was a good day to take in the atmosphere and laze on the beach. The water however is frigid and not possible to enter.
Day 5: The saving grace. Had 2 amazing visits to Villard Fine Wines and Attilio & Mochi in the Casablanca Valley. Villard is a family owned and run winery. The property is beautiful. The staff (Nicole) and winemaker Charlie were very welcoming. The tour was nice and the wines were outstanding. There Chardonnay was great and amazingly cheap. Their flagstaff estate grown Syrah was my favorite wine of the trip. Later in the day we drove to Attilio & Mochi. A husband and wife team running an upstart winery out of shipping containers. The experience we had with Angela was my favorite wine tourism experience ever. She was so welcoming and informative, and it was amazing to see this small scale process with one of the principal owners and winemakers. The both of them seemed truly passionate in their work. It was refreshing to see after so many frigid experiences with completely indifferent staff at wineries in Chile and South Africa this past month. Attilio & Mochi’s wines are cool climate, but unfortunately for us, there production can’t keep up with the demand, so a few of there releases were sold out. The wines we did taste were full of surprises and extremely well made, including a very low production and interesting grenache. I have a feeling their wines are going to take off in 5-10 years and become one of the boutique darlings.
Just our opinion, but from a tourism standpoint, we were highly disappointed with this Central Region in Chile. And I’m usually not that hard on the places where I go.