Montes Winery

Friday, April 18 – Day 123

I visited two excellent wineries today. My taxi driver Alejandro picked me up at 11:30 (no need to rush into these things), and dropped me off at the front door of the Montes winery.

Montes is one of the larger wine producers in Chile and has been around for quite some time. This specific winery, however, is relatively new. They hired a feng shui expert to advise on the design, and play Gregorian chants to the wine barrels in the cellar. The wine was great, I got to meet one of the four owners, and there were only two other people on the tour. Pretty cool.

The B&B owner gave me a suggestion for lunch, but Alejandro said that it was a place for touristas. So I asked him, “Where do you have lunch, Alejandro?” He told me of a cafeteria that he likes, but said that it’s usually just full of locals. Perfect. I told him to take me there, and that I’d buy his lunch. He didn’t speak a word of English, but was patient enough with my Spanish that I was able to learn a lot about him and his city, and I thought was just as much fun as the wine tour.

My second winery was Clos Alpata, which is big, big money. It’s run by a lady that is a member of the Lapostolle family – the 2nd largest wine producer in the Chile. She married a guy that is part of the Mariner family from France. And that would be the Grand Mariner family. They spent an insane amount of money and dug a whole six stories down into a granite mountainside to build this winery. The design is stunning, but you see very little of it from the road.

The whole process is based upon using gravity to move the wine around – less mechanical pumping, less oxidation. You finish on the bottom floor were the barrels are kept at the perfect temperature and humidity by Mother Nature. There’s an altar-like table with a glass top in the middle of the room, and that’s where we did our tasting. It’s kind of dark, so you can’t see much. Then the guide turned on a light beneath us, and we could then see through the table, and down into the owner’s private cellar. One end of the table opens to reveal a staircase that leads down to 10,000 bottles of the world’s finest wines. Now that’s a nice touch.


Saturday, April 19 – Day 124

The History Museum in Santa Cruz is owned by a local guy that is reported to be a former arms dealer. He has the most stunning collection of pre-Columbian artifacts in Chile, and just about everything else he could find. Dinosaur bones and mastodon teeth, war artifacts, typewriters cameras and printing presses, 400 year old religious decrees from the Vatican and King of Spain, horse-drawn carriages, and steam engines. It’s a really odd collection of stuff, but very impressive.