Caliterra

Winemaker Comment

This wine features a deep dark colour with ruby rim. Its aromatic richness is intense and pleasant and displays notes of moist tobacco leaves, dried fruit, and chocolate &all characteristics of wines made from sufficiently ripe grapes. This wine is generous in the glass and boasts a lush mouthfeel. Its excellent balance, rich bouquet, and soft tannins lead to a long finish.

Vintage Note

The 2005-2006 growing season was a cold, dry season. The accumulated heat summation measured in degree days (based on 10°C / 50ºF) between October 2005 and April 2006 was in almost all of the valleys lower than it was during the 2005 season and over the course of the past seven years.

The primary challenge of the 2006 vintage was the particularly long wait for each variety to reach proper phenolic maturity, which resulted in higher sugar levels in the grapes. As it was particularly cold in the Colchagua valley, the metabolism of the vines was much slower compared to normal years and the harvest started first at the end of April.

As the climatic circumstances were very favourable towards the end of the growing season and due to quality-oriented viticultural measures undertaken, the grapes were very healthy at the moment of harvesting.

Fermentation and Aging

The grapes used for our Tribute Carmenere 2006 were hand-picked into bins, destemmed, gently crushed, and transferred to stainless-steel tanks for fermentation and maceration. The wine was aged for 14 months in 80% American and 20% French oak barrels, during which time it underwent malolactic fermentation. Clarification occurred naturally as the wine settled during ageing. The wine was fined with egg whites and lightly filtered before bottling in August 2007.