Cousino Macul Wine Tasting

Before I get to the meat of this blog, a quick bit of advance news:  I will be going to Patagonia tomorrow through March 3rd!  I'm very excited for this, a trip to Torres del Paine was one of the main reasons I decided to come to Chile.  Now that I'm finally all packed up, please consider this blog post your holdover until my glorious return from the southernmost part of the Americas...

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One of my longtime private students has taken a 3 week vacation from his job.  In this time, he told me he wants to "focus on building English", so we've been meeting in the afternoons to practice English.  In our last class, he invited me to join him and his sister on a tour at Chile's oldest vineyard, the Cousino Macul winery.  I met them at a metro stop, which turned out to be a little bit of a hassle.  There were 3 different entrances to the metro, and we showed up to different entrances.  And then when we realized there were other entrances, we both walked to different entrances again.  A few more phone calls back and forth, and we were able to figure out what was going on.  After our little scooby-doo chase scene homage, we drove about 20 minutes to the compound.

Upon arriving, we spent a good 5 minutes waiting for the doddering old man behind the gate to confirm us as guests for a tour.  The majority of the time spent waiting was watching us watch the old man shuffle papers around in his little booth, until it looked like he finally thought to himself "ah f*ck it" and raised the gate.

We entered the park 10 minutes late for the tour, so we tried to park in the closest lots that we saw.  However, at each lot an old man would come up to the side of our car and tell us we couldn't park there.  Finally we came up to the side of one of the loading bays for large trucks, parked the car, and quickly exited before anybody could tell us we didn't belong there.  The tour had already started, and we walked in to the middle of the man describing the grapes to us.

...in Portugese.  So, instead of understanding my normal 80% of the discussion, I was relegated to about 40% once again.  It felt like September all over again.  Fortunately Luis and his sister were able to help fill in some of the blanks for me - Portugese is similar enough to Spanish where a native-speaker can understand significantly more of it than a gringo such as yours truly.

The crazy thing about these grapes was their relative size.  Here's a shot of one in my hand:

I felt like a giant eating them.  I would have eaten more, but there were about 2-3 large seeds inside each of them.  The juice was not worth the squeeze, so to speak.

After the fields, we went into one of the large barrack-like structures.  Built in 1887, these buildings were constructed of large bricks and a mortar made of cement, sand, and eggs.  The guy said about 70,000 eggs were used in making the mortar for each of the buildings.  Inside the buildings were huge barrels where the wine used to ferment back in the day.

Nowadays, they use metal containers to ferment and refine the wine.  These new containers reduce the fermentation time from 3-4 months to 1 month.  These particular containers below are where Cousino Macul produces the majority of their high-end wines.

They were all empty when we arrived though, so we did not get to sample any of the raw high-end goods.

We were then taken down into the basement of the main warehouse, where we got to see where the wine is aged in barrels until it is ready to be bottled.

At one point, the lights went out for about 5 seconds.  I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but it was pretty harrowing.  It was then that I was reminded that Chile gets tremors every month, and occasional bonafide earthquakes too.  I called upon everything I'd ever learned from action movies to ensure my survival.  So I quickly sided up to the most attractive single girl on the tour, knowing that if anything happened, we'd be the last to die.

One other interesting thing at the end of this death hall - there was a caged off room with some apparent goodies inside it:

 1937 Cabernet Sauvignon, anybody?

I asked the tour guide what the deal was with the wine in there.  He told me that it was actually ruined at this point.  It sounded like it had been left to sit for too long, and it had broken down to a point where it had lost all flavor.  Either that, or it was a bad batch to begin with.

(Sort of related note - I've found that now, if I ask relatively short questions, I come across as enough of a speaker to where the other assumes I can follow them speaking normally.  It's a compliment, really, but it leads to long-winded diatribes on the other's part, and I lose track of what they're saying about halfway through.  I need to start asking longer, more complicated questions so they realize I'm still just a gringo in Chilean clothing.)

Upstairs, they showed off some of the old equipment used to bottle wine.  It looked like the tank from of one of those ancient fire engines with a little hand pump and hose attached.

It looked like a pretty ingenious invention for the time, really.  Right next to the old bottling machine hung an old picture from the vineyard of all its employees and a full season's harvest.

That year amounted to about 400 bottles.  It was a record crop at whatever time it was (somewhere in the 1920s, I think).

After that we got to try 3 types of Cousino Macul wine - a blush, a cabernet, and another unknown heavy red that wasn't bad.  I don't think I'll be adding any of them to my regular wine rotation (even though it's a thin roster), but they were still pretty good.  It's funny, every beer or wine tastes a little better after you take a tour of how it's made.

See you all in March!