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La Despensa on the wine it said it would never make
The English founder of Chilean winery La Despensa had zero intentions of making wine. But a neighbour’s fateful comment proved eerily true, reports Sarah McCleery.
Matt Ridgway’s path to winemaking was an unusually winding one.
A young man leaves his Dorset home, with a plan to travel the world and perhaps finish in Southeast Asia, where he thinks he might teach English as a foreign language.
Spoiler alert. Ridgway actually finds himself in Ecuador, which he doesn’t much fancy, and takes a flight from there to Argentina, where he falls in love with a Chilean. The relationship doesn’t last, but Matt ends up based in Chile. More precisely, the Colchagua Valley.
While travelling, Ridgway began buying, refurbishing and selling on homes. At the beginning, he thought he would do the same with his Chilean home, which he’d planned to landscape with fruit trees. His neighbour joked that he’d end up planting vines and would be making wine in two years’ time.
At the time Matt laughed, but the joke has been on him. As he says now, “vineyard ownership and winemaking are something that happened to me, rather than something I was looking to do … [it’s] a wine I said I’d never make, from a vineyard I said I’d never plant!”
Ridgway is both canny and humble and has created La Despensa winery from nothing. He’s self-taught, ably supported by Google, YouTube and local know-how.
“I learned each step as I came to it, with friends helping me out when and necessary,” he tells db. “If I had to pick anywhere in the world to make wine, it’d be Chile. The cliché is that the country is a viticultural paradise, but it holds absolutely true in the Central Valley in general, and the Colchagua Valley in particular. The climate is perfect, with extremely low humidity and usually zero rainfall during the growing season…”
An Englishman in Chile
As an Englishman living and making wine in Chile, it is interesting to hear what Ridgway things about the South American country’s approach to promoting its wines in the UK.
“I get the feeling that Chilean winemakers like to focus on regions and DOs, but being English means I can see things from a different perspective. My experience is that many consumers in the UK couldn’t care less if the wine is from Maipo, Colchagua or Itata: they’ve never heard of any of them.”
He continues, “the number one challenge for the Chilean wine industry is to shake off the image that Chilean wine is good value and not worth paying more than a tenner for. The market needs entry level wine, but it makes life for the many smaller wineries, which produce amazing wines, extremely hard as our wines typically have a retail price of more than £18.00.”
Ridgway is blessed to have a 1.5 ha parcel of old vine País that has survived for – he thinks – more than 150 years. He is an enthusiastic advocate of Chile’s historic vineyards and believes they have a critical role to play in the export market.
“There are more than 10,000 hectares of seriously old-vine País in Maule and further south… which is insane. We talk about Chile being New World, but these vines go from 80 to more than 300 years old, and they still produce great grapes.”
Ridgway calls his País vineyard in Pumanque “a beast”. The pruning is different from the typical low-level bush vines, with some having the appearance of little trees, reaching two meters in height, entirely unsupported.
“After all this time, they produce ridiculous amounts of amazing grapes, in some instances more than 25kg per vine,” he says. “It’s a dry-farmed vineyard on the absolute minimum, no rainfall whatsoever from budbreak to post harvest.”
Ridgway concludes, “it is an absolutely stunning example of Chile’s viticultural history, and we are honoured to make wine from it.”
Rhône varieties
While Ridgway talks passionately about Chile’s old vines, he nonetheless had focused his own vineyard planting on the Rhône varieties, such as Syrah, Grenache, Roussanne and Marsanne. Across the range, the wines have impressive freshness and varietal expression.
“We make high-quality, fault-free wines that can be drunk immediately or that can be aged for years… We’re low intervention for sure, but if we must intervene, we will. We’re not a big industrial operation, it just means that we are incredibly careful at every step of the winemaking process. Making wine is easy, if you’re good at cleaning!”
He is determinedly and cheerfully forging his own path, and his decision to plant Sangiovese in Colchagua is a curve ball, but one that has had delicious results. The second vintage of the wine has just arrived on UK shores, imported by Condor Wines.
When Ridgway talks to the drinks business he is back in the UK, and it seems prudent to ask whether he’s considering exporting English wines to sell in Chile.
“I’d love to and have investigated it in the past, but the cost is a massive stumbling block,” he admits. ” I love Langham’s wines. I’ve got to know winemaker Tommy Grimshaw well. It’s an incredible job he’s done, having taken over the winery at such a ridiculously young age. I’m also hugely impressed with what Nico and Natalia have done with Stanlake Park as an overall project. They’ve taken a struggling vineyard and winery and created something amazing, right on the edge of London.”
He won’t be drawn on the likelihood of him setting up a vineyard in the UK just yet, but for now the Englishman in Chile is doing just fine.
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