The Casablanca Valley sits between the Coastal cities of Valparaiso and San Antonio and the inland capital of Santiago. It is one of Chile’s wine producing areas. The valley has a wet winter and a warm, dry summer. In the summer, the temperatures are cool at night, dropping to the high 40s. At dawn, fog rolls in from the coast and gathers at the foot of the mountains until it burns off mid-morning and the valley gets temperatures in the 80s. These are great conditions for grape vines that produce wine.

We took a day tour to visit the Casas Del Bosque winery for a wine tasting. Nico (left) is a student in enology and was our guide.

The winery grows Sauvignon, Pino Noir, Cabernet and Carmenere grapes. They also grow Syrah grapes on their higher hills because they get more son and less fog.

There are a few interesting features of this winery that make it a little different from other wineries that we have visited. First is the Carmenere grape. California growers brought the grape to their state where it picked up an insect. When roots were re-imported to France the insect spread and killed all the Carmenere grapes. Biologists thought this variety was extinct. But it some vines were found growing among Merlot grapes in Chile, without the parasite, and so the crop was reestablished in Chile and in France.

A second interesting feature of this winery is that they ferment and age their wines in both oak barrels and cement containers. In the Republic of Georgia wine is aged in ceramic containers buried in the soil. Ageing in cement or ceramic has advantages. Cement and ceramic containers do not impart the oak flavor to the wine, allowing it to develop a fruitier flavor. It also keeps the wine at a more consistent temperature during fermentation and aging. Finally, you can shape concrete and ceramic containers to allow for circulation. The yeast cells circulate, improving the texture of the wine.

The third interesting feature of this winery is that when they age wine in barrels, they only stack them two high. This is because of earthquakes. During one earthquake Chile lost 80% of its wine because the barrels crashed to the ground and broke open.

The wine tasting convinced us to buy a couple of bottles.

After visiting the Penfolds Winery in Australia two years ago, we were pleasantly surprised at the price. The bottles we were looking at were only 7,400 to 12,000 pesos each. That comes to about USD $7.60 to $12.60 a bottle.