Ventisquero Pinot Noir Reserva

This is one of those everyday-priced wines that shows the quality of a higher priced model, like their twenty-five dollar version.  Since we've tasted the two side by side, we feel we can safely say, it's basically the same stuff.  And by the way, the higher tier pinot is no slouch.

Ventisquero means "glacier" in the local Chilean dialect and it refers to the great glaciers of Patagonia which they feel symbolize character and a perfect balance of movement, energy and force.  Since we're talking Pinot Noir here, let's just stay with character and balance.

Vina Ventisquero was established in 1998 by Gonzalo Vial, CEO of a major fresh foods company.  Their flagship vineyard and winery was constructed in coastal Maipo Valley but in quick order they purchased vineyard land in the Leyda, Casablanca, Colchagua and Huasco Valleys.  Today they have 1500 hectares (3700 acres) in vines.  They export one and a half million cases of wine annually.

Now called Ventisquero Wine Estates, it is one of the five largest in Chile and while their growth has been explosive, it has also been thoughtful.  Felipe Tosso is the head winemaker who has been with the company from the beginning.  Australian winemaker John Duval came along a couple years later.  Both have impeccable resumes reflecting employment with some of the great wineries of the world.  Together they use their own soil-mapping methods to get the right varietals placed in the perfect locales for optimal terroir-driven results.  The vineyards for our Pinot Noir are along the coast of Casablanca where the ocean's cooling Humbolt Current moderates the temperatures for that cool weather grape.

Chile is bordered by the Pacific Ocean on the left and the Andes Mountains to the right.  Because of their unique geography, they never were affected by the phylloxera louse that killed nearly all of the vines of Europe in the late 1800s.  The louse that brought the disease to Europe then proceeded to decimate the rest of the world.  Chile is the only wine producing nation to be unaffected.  They are the only wine producers who have not had to graft their vines onto American disease resistent rootstocks; so the theory goes that the production of Chile is emblematic of what European wine was pre-Phylloxera.