Chile’s Challenge

If Chile can exploit the general trend towards organic living with correctly marketed wines, it might have discovered a neat way to claw back market share in the under £5 market

IT’S TYPICAL, isn’t it? You book a flight for a business trip well in advance, you plan your schedule fully, then you turn up at the airport at the appointed time – and what happens? It’s cancelled.  I’ll give you three guesses – no two, no, make that one guess, which airline it was. BA? Could have been this month, but no. Virgin? Don’t be silly. Aeroflot? Close, but no banana. Iberia? Bingo.

How do the Spanish do it? Great food, great wine, awful airlines. Still, it serves me pretty well right for being so cheap.  Still, the aforementioned flight did eventually take off – 24 hours later – and delivered me to one of the most promising wine countries in the world; Chile.

Not that you’d know it from the rather woeful write-ups the country has had in recent years.  It seems to have rapidly progressed from wannabe, through next big thing, directly to has-been, as far as many in the trade are concerned. Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks.

"Bit boring" is the most oft used descriptive of the country’s wine offering.  I’m not saying they haven’t hit a bit of a slump, but "boring" is the sort of word that’s best reserved for describing the latest Cliff Richard record, or perhaps for a damning criticism of the latest Ford.

It’s not really relevant to wines that are basically doing the job they’re meant to, ie providing good value, and decent drinking, which is exactly what a lot of the wines making their way over from the shores of Chile do.

Admittedly they’ve lost some of their sheen, but is that them, or is that us and our ridiculous new sensation junkyism, our constant desire as consumers to have something shiny and new and different?

Well, even if it is the result of our own perverse obsession, it actually doesn’t matter.  And that’s because Chile has a few new baubles on the way to our shores that should keep the most devoted addict of the sensational happy.

One of those baubles is a whole new range of grape varieties.  Traditionally, the Chilean gamut of varietals has run simply from Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, directly through to Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, with only the odd Carmenère in between for good luck.

For the past decade, however, the nation’s more intrepid winemakers have been playing around with a completely different set of vinous toys, and consumers will shortly see the results on the shelf.

That means we’re going to see more Rieslings, Syrahs and Viogniers tumbling out of the country’s wineries over the coming months and years, some of which will be great, some not so great.  But it indicates that Chile is desperately trying to break out of the £4 to £5 market where competition for share is increasingly tough.

Another of the baubles we can expect, comes in the form of organics.  More and more of Chile’s wineries are investigating using sustainable farming methods and looking closely at organic methods of vine growing.

Errázuriz is just one example. Pedro Izquierdo, chief viticulturalist at Errázuriz is adamant in his claim that he can convert the entire vineyard to organic within the next 10 years.

"It’s what Chile can do and it can do it relatively easily, given our climatic advantages and the relative ‘viticultural paradise’ that we live in.  I mean give the consumer the choice and what will they go for? A wine that has been produced in a way that is kinder to the environment or one that is not?"

Importantly, from the organic perspective, Chile has a distinct cost advantage.  Labour is cheap, natural resources are plentiful and they don’t suffer from the same vine diseases that have made organics costly for the majority of producers in other wine producing nations.

At the moment, much of the organic wine that lines our supermarket shelves tends to be in the £5 and over bracket.  However, if Chile can exploit the general trend towards organic living with correctly marketed wines, it might have discovered a neat way to claw back market share in the under £5 market.

Clearly Chile does have problems, but it seems to be pulling its socks up and wading back in. The new trade office in the UK is one example, as are the planned trade offices for the US and for Germany.

And importers are being encouraged by the fact that the country has had a string of strong vintages since 1999.  There’s excitement out there, it just needs a little bit of digging around to find it.

However, as Irene Paiva, chief winemaker at Viña San Pedro, points out, "It’s frustrating when people try to write off a whole industry with a few words.  If I were a consumer and could be sure that I was opening a wine that delivered each time – which is often the case with Chile – I’d  be happy." She has a point. 

Charlotte Hey is publisher of The Drinks Business.