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Watch Patrick Schmitt MW taste £100 Chilean wine from Vik
Patrick Schmitt MW gives his verdict on the wines of Vik – a remarkable newcomer to Chile’s fine wine scene founded by Norwegian entrepreneur Alexander Vik.
Having spent many years assessing the great Cabernet Sauvignons of the Maipo valley – the likes of Almaviva, Don Melchor, Casa Real and Vinedo Chadwick – last year I got to know the top red wine blends of the Cachapoal valley, and I was impressed.
Where their Maipo equivalents have masses of intense blackcurrant flavours and firm tannins, the ones from Cachapoal have more red berry aromatics, and softer tannins on the finish.
But that’s a general conclusion from the region. So, in the video below I look at three wines from the Vik vineyards, which are based in Cachapoal, but within a specific and distinctive area called Millahue – meaning ‘place of gold’.
Chosen by Vik for its potential to make reds to rival the finest in the world, these are serious drops – and the top one, costing £100, is priced on a par with great Cabernets from Bordeaux, Tuscany or California.
Watch the video below for my thoughts on the range, and a brief history of the Vik winery in Cachapoal.
Great Video Patrick! I hope you are well and I look forward to catching up t some point!
With all due respect to everybody’s work and engagement in the wine-world 3.0, but regrettably I have to say that the marketing of wine and the rapid grown self-marketing of Master of Wines and Master Sommelier today are being an increasingly unfortunate combination.
All the so-called professional events, e.g. in Germany, which I have attended just only in the last five years, took place in the same tone of voice – somewhere between evening prayer, car presentation, teleprompter and children’s fashion.
Where has the professionally committed critical awareness of a taster gone? The honest, naked evaluation at new presentations?
It’s an unpleasant and growing phenomenon, more and more Master of Wine and Master Sommelier want to monetize their expensive or very expensive, mostly self-financed competence-speedtraining quickly. This includes lectures, moderating sessions, public tastings, comments, articles, videos etc., as uninhibited, commercial pay orders. And unfortunately, this has now very often no more value than any other form of paid journalism. A great pity, and very superfluous.
In Germany, for example, even seasoned and established wine journalists are now willing to be “booked” for benevolent content stories. This leads to unfortunate events, where pure designer wines for the luxury clientele, which were practically only created on the drawing board, such as “Ao Yun” (China) or “4G” (South Africa), are unrealistically valued and thus drastically exaggeratedly pushed for the market.
Exactly likewise wine print magazines also show a false respect for potential advertising major customers, like big brand wine producer dynasties, to support some new “cult-wine” for example. One does not risk losing lucrative bookings of these famous wineries and factories. In result it’s often a mild and uncritical, even sometimes enological false reporting. That is all possible but definitely no art of highbrow wine reporting.
All demand a straight form of a truly independent wine journalism, and not anymore pastoral nice-writing nor the ever same bedtime storytelling of greater and greater and even greater wines.
But almost nobody delivers anymore such a quality nowadays. That’s a bit absurd.
I think a fundamentally new attitude is needed in the coverage of the great wine theater, which is moving further and further away from consumers and wine lovers and which nobody can understand in the end.
Yours respectfully
Michael Holzinger
Germany – Berlin