Hub AI
I am having dinner tonight with a winemaker from Catalonia and his Toronto-based importer. I am not familiar with his wines, but I trust the agent, whom I’ve known for about 20 years, and I’m curious about what it’s like to make wine in the hills just south of Barcelona. I’m confident it will be an informative and entertaining couple of hours at the table, but I’m a bit nervous about meeting someone new. I spent the morning’s dog walk thinking of small talk to make at the beginning of the meeting. I’ve been to the Catalan wine country further south of Barcelona, so that seemed like something I could bring up. But that trip, organized by the consortium of wine producers in Priorat, was more than 10 years ago, and the memories were a bit foggy. In the end, I had to do some research on myself. I remembered going for a fantastic lunch and tasting at Clos Figueras, I remembered the terraced walls and almond trees at Clos Galena’s Formiga vineyard (largely because the Catalan word for “ant” is close enough to the French one for me to remember it and the insects on the label), and the James Bond villain-like space station winery at Ferrer Bobet. But everything else was a bit of a blur. I had to think about where I’d been, because I hadn’t been back. I do my best to visit a few wine regions every year. This is most often by invitation; to the extent that I choose where to be invited, I tend towards places I haven’t been before. I can only take so many trips, so why wouldn’t I try and see somewhere new? It is more than eminently possible to enjoy wines from places one has never been. I do all the time, and I even write about them. However, putting one’s boots on the ground that grows the grapes, or even just the city where most of the wine is sold, provides an entirely deeper layer of understanding about a region and its wine. Felicity Carter writes this week, in Menninger’s International, that while wine sales slump, wine tourism continues to grow. If fewer people are drinking wine, or more people are drinking less wine, then at least those who do are interested in where it comes from. I hope it’s not just wishful thinking to believe a corollary might be a growing interest in wine writing. Our culture puts so much emphasis on the new and the novel that it’s easy to forget the value of the familiar. But, as the economist Richard R. Nelson put it, “There may be more to learn from climbing the same mountain a hundred times than from climbing a hundred different mountains.” Journalists, especially “lifestyle journalists” like me, are often accused of being “a mile wide and an inch thin.” It’s probably good for us to get a bit of depth once and a while. Of the four professional wine trips I took this year, three were return voyages. I went back to the Alto Adige after an absence of six years, the Rhône Valley after nine, and the Western Cape of South Africa after 12. I learned new things and deepened my understanding of each by returning. The first trip I took this year, though, was new: Chile. As I wrote in The Hub, that was a van trip, where I visited as many wineries in as many wine regions as could be packed into the better part of a week. It was a fantastic introduction, but it only served to whet my appetite, and I left the long skinny country at the other end of the Americas wanting to know more. The opportunity to return manifested itself last week, when my wife, a couple who are good friends, and I spent a week’s holiday in Chile. There was no van, just a rental car to get us between the two cities of Santiago and Valparaiso. We spent all of our time exploring the two towns, except for a winery pit stop at Casas del Bosque in the Casablanca Valley that lies between them. If the press trip tour of Chile was about seeing where Chilean wines come from and meeting the people who make them, then this holiday trip was about seeing the wines in their natural habitat. We wanted to see how Chilenos enjoy their wines (or at least I did). So we walked the streets, sat at the tables, and tried as many Chilean wines as we could (responsibly, of course). Our foursome has traveled together before, including a trip we did last year to Buenos Aires (which formed the basis of this piece in The Hub). We have a system: pick a neighbourhood to explore during the day, and take our chances finding a spot for lunch, then book a spot for dinner. There’s often a bit of a HiLo between a casual lunch and a fancier dinner. Before my first trip to Chile, I didn’t know much (anything) about Chilean food. I might have got a hint if I had looked at a map of the country’s 6,453-kilometre-long Pacific coastline. Chile is a paradise of very fresh seafood that’s served raw as Nikkei-style sushi, acidulated as ceviche, or cooked in all manner of ways, including chupe or pastel de jaiba: stew or pie of crab, baked in a gratin of cream. So, between casual lunches, formal dinners, and ordering as much seafood as four maritime-challenged Upper Canadians could manage, I think we got a pretty good survey of the wine lists of Santiago and Valparaiso. And what I can report back on is the incredible lightness of Chilean wine. Delicate and fresh wines, red and white, were there when we needed them. Of course, there were always big Cabernet Sauvignon and Carménère red wines when required (I had a digestion-aiding glass of Cab at lunch one day when faced with a giant pork lomito sandwich). But there were also always crisp Sauvignon Blanc or fresh Chardonnay. The whites came mostly from the nearby Leyda and Casablanca valleys, or further north from Limari. All three regions are considered cool Chilean climates because of their proximity to the Pacific Ocean, which runs very cold there from the Humboldt Current. It’s the light reds of Chile that really taught me a lesson on this trip. I had some exposure to them in January, especially at Leonardo Erazo’s winery in the Itata Valley, about five hours south of Santiago. But I didn’t know if these wines were a boutique specialty for export, or shown to my press group as a token alternative to the big production wines that dominate exports. They’re neither, and everything from sandwich shops in Santiago and tourist traps in Valparaiso are listing the new face of Chilean red wines. Or is it the old face of Chilean wine? At fancy restaurants, like Boncanáriz and Ambrosia in Santiago or La Caperucita y el Lobo in Valparaiso, we had no trouble finding light, red fruit-flavoured reds. They’re often made from old vines of Paìs (aka Mission) or Cinsault, and they come from valleys to the south: Maule, Itata, or Bio Bio. More and more of these wines are finding their way north to Canada. Look for them in the boutique section of wine retailers. Is it better to climb one mountain twice than two mountains? I don’t know. I do know that my second ascension to Chile just made me want to go back.
Dining and Cooking