Caliterra

Winemaker Comment

In our lands, as in Colchagua and many other places in Chile, the entire season, including the harvest, was marked by a slightly cooler climate and precipitations. This allowed us to wait as long as was needed in order to carry out the harvest at its peak of ripeness and with greater fruit and fresh characteristics.

Vintage Note

We in Colchagua, and in fact most of Chile, experienced exceptional warm, sunny, and rain-free weather throughout the entire season, including harvest. Carménère is a late-ripening varietal, and the sun this year helped lead to a nearly ideal maturity level, which now provides us with the opportunity to taste a magnificent example of the variety.
Our vineyards were worked by sectors, which consists of rationally separating the different plots according to the variance in heterogeneity generated by the diversity present in the soils. We use the latest technology and multispectral images to determine the state of maturity on a plant by plant basis and then harvest uniform sectors of fruit that are taken to the cellar and begin their own route to the bottle rather than being mixed into a mass of grapes of varying degrees of ripeness. This requires a very close degree of separation of sub-lots, such as occurs naturally the variations of the soil beneath the plants.

Fermentation and Aging

As has become habitual each season, once again working the vineyard in a polygon manner was crucial during this season. This consists of rationally separating the heterogeneity within the different blocks; differences that were generated by the diversity found in the soils. Using state of the art technology with multispectral images, we were able to differentiate the level of ripeness from plant to plant in order to be able to separately take uniform fruit polygons to the storage facility. This marks the beginning of an individual path towards the bottle that is not accompanied by a mass of grapes with different degrees of ripeness. This implicates a certain degree of separation of the sub-batches that rigorously adheres to how the variation of soils underneath the plants naturally occurs.
During this harvest in particular, we have had to ever-so-carefully manage the fruit since due to the fact that this season had a delay in ripening, the precise selection of ripeness for each batch allowed us to obtain wines with superb fruit expression along with proper roundness in the mouth and an excellent balance of freshness.
Fermentation was performed in stainless steel tanks at initial temperatures of 30° Celsius that were reduced afterwards to 26º Celsius so as to avoid over extraction of the skins. The wine was aged in oak barrels for 10 months during which time the malolactic fermentation took place.