LFE Gran Reserva Roussanne Marsanne, Colchagua Valley, Chile 2024 (£10, Tesco)
What to make of Chilean wine these days? For most people it’s still a place to turn to for well-made bottles at reasonable prices – or what one of the country’s most thoughtful and talented winemakers, Francisco Baettig, formerly of bigwigs Errazuriz, now making superb small-batch wines under his own label (Baettig) in Malleco in the far south of the long, thin country’s wine lands, calls “safe good value” from a handful of famous grape varieties. Chile still excels in this tricky-to-get-right field, not least Errazuriz, in wines such as the comfortingly suave Errazuriz Gran Reserva Cabernet Sauvignon, Aconcagua 2022 (down to £10 from £12 until 1 July, Waitrose). But a lot of my favourite modern Chilean wines are doing creative things with less familiar varieties. Another reliable big firm, LFE, who are responsible for some of the supermarkets’ best Chilean own-labels, has an example of the sort of thing I mean: a completely charming, soft, downy peachy, gently blossomy middleweight of a white made from roussanne and marsanne.
Morande Terroir Semillon, Maule, Chile 2023 (from £14.29, Hay Wines; Evington’s Wines; Vin Cognito; Blas ar Fwyd)
The style of the wines made from roussanne, marsanne or a mix of the two in Chile naturally harks back to the French region where both varieties originate – the Rhône Valley. And it’s not surprising that they thrive in those parts of Chile where the Rhône’s most famous red variety, syrah, and other southern French varieties do well. Among those places is Cauquenes in the Maule Valley, which has a climate very similar to the southern Rhône Valley or Languedoc-Roussillon – ideal for making a honeysuckle-scented, lushly apricotty dry white such as Undurraga Cauquenes Estate Viognier-Roussanne-Marsanne 2024 (£9.75, thewinesociety.com), where a third Rhône variety, the lush, verging-on-decadent, viognier, joins the party. It may be more Atlantic (Bordeaux) than Mediterranean in origin, but another more unusual variety doing good things in the Maule is semillon. The old vines responsible for Morande’s bottling make for an outstandingly concentrated dry white with the feel and scent of citrus (lemon, grapefruit and orange) essential oils complemented by leafy herbiness.
Juanicó Teru Teru Albariño, Juanicó, Canalones, Uruguay 2024 (£10.95, The Wine Society)
I’ve yet to come across a Chilean example of albariño, a currently much-in-vogue grape variety with origins in Atlantic Iberia, although I’m sure it will thrive in the places where I hear it’s been planted: Pacific coastal vineyards such as the Leyda Valley west of the capital Santiago. For the moment, however, Uruguay is the South American country beating off competition from newcomers in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the south of France to make the finest examples of albariño outside Spain and Portugal. That shouldn’t be all that surprising: Uruguay’s relatively wet, Atlantic-influenced climate has much in common with albariño/alvarinho’s cool hotspots Rías Baixas in Galicia and Vinho Verde in northern Portugal. And the South American country’s winemakers are increasingly able to capture the distinctively thrilling characteristics of the best albariõ – namely the combination of salty-mineral freshness with juicy white-nectarine succulence found in Juanicó’s pristine bottling from the eponymous wine region just a few miles north of the city limits of the country’s capital, Montevideo.