‘Chile should not follow fashion’

Chile should stick to a wine style and not follow fashion, according to Cecilia Torres, the winemaker for Santa Rita Casa Real Cabernet Sauvignon.

Cecilia Torres believes Chile should stick to a winemaking style rather than try to follow fashion

Torres made the comment following a vertical tasting to celebrate Casa Real’s 25^th birthday in Chile last November, where she presented wines back to 1995 to a collection of journalists, wine buyers and sommeliers at the eighteenth century Casa Real estate in the Maipo Valley.

She also surprised attendees by playing The Dark Side of the Moon by English rock band Pink Floyd during the tasting.

Defending her music choice, she stated that both the Casa Real brand, which launched with the 1989 vintage, and Pink Floyd, which released its best-selling album in the early 70s, were “modern classics”.

Torres, who has made Casa Real since its inaugural vintage, said that there have been few changes to the winemaking approach over the past 25 years.

“There is no fashion here – we only make subtle changes,” she stated, before pointing out that, for example, since 2012 she has introduced fermentation in oak barrels for 10% of the blend.

Furthermore, she admitted that while there was a period in the noughties when the trend was to harvest Casa Real a little later than the previous decade, today she is “looking for fruit and freshness.”

No heavyweight: Casa Real comes in a standard bottle

Also, five years ago she reduced the proportion of new oak from 100% to 90%.

“The winemaking is very classic,” she said, adding that she eshews long macerations because she wants “elegance, not power”, but uses 6-8% press wine to bring “richness”.

Summing up her approach to Casa Real, and her desire to remain a “modern classic” she told db, “Chile is a young country and has to go for a style, it should not follow the fashion.”

Concluding, she said, “Chile has a great potential to make very nice wines that can show their quality in time.”

Before his death last year, Torres worked closely with Bordeaux wine consultant Jacques Boissenot, who she said gave her great confidence to retain the Casa Real style throughout the past decades.

The wine comes from a 20-hectare block of Cabernet Sauvignon planted in the 1960s called the Carneros Viejo vineyard. It is located in the Alto Jahuel area in the Alto Maipo and has produced a vintage of Casa Real every year since 1989, apart from 1992, 2000, and 2006.

Pleasingly, and unusually for a flagship New World wine, Casa Real comes in a standard Bordeaux bottle, and with a reasonable price tag: it costs around £35 in the UK for the current vintage release, which is 2011 or 2012, depending on the retailer.

Nevertheless, the wine has also earned the accolade of becoming the most expensive Chilean wine ever to go on sale in the UK, when its inaugural 1989 vintage went on sale in August last year at Mayfair’s Greenhouse restaurant for £850.