Extreme viticulture

Around the millennium, much of Chile’s wine production – and just about all the interest – was firmly centred within a 150km radius of Santiago. Well, not any more. Over the past 20 years, Chile’s grape-growing boundaries have not so much been pushed back as disappeared altogether. Producers are planting in areas that previous generations probably couldn’t even have found on a map, let alone considered for viticulture.

From the dust of the Atacama Desert in the north to the verdant hills of the Lake District in the south, from the breezy Pacific coast to the stony Andes slopes, vineyards are springing up everywhere. It’s a wholesale reimagining of what Chilean wine is, can be, and perhaps always should have been, all about.

‘If you want to make a great wine, you must take a risk. Safe places [equal] boring wine’