Chile’s Viña Leyda hails ‘promising’ 2019 harvest

The 2019 harvest in Chile’s Leyda Valley is set to surpass the “great” harvest of 2018, according to Viviana Navarrette, winemaker at global wine group VSPT’s Viña Leyda winery.

Speaking to db last month, Navarrette said the 2019 harvest in the small sub-region of the San Antonio Valley in Chile, 55 miles (90km) west of the Chilean capital, Santiago, was looking very promising, with yields up 2% on last year’s ‘great’ Chilean harvest and the “lovely” wines showing “crispy, vibrant” fruit.

Last year the region benefited from cooler temperatures than some of Chile’s other wine regions, Navarette said, and there were some differences discernible this year as well.

“The 2018’s harvest was great all along our country and it was a cooler vintage in Leyda,” she said.

Temperatures in January were slightly higher [than last year], followed by a fresh and foggy February and a warmer March, which benefitted from the Humboldt current – a cooling ocean current that flows along the coast of Chile and Peru, giving a cool maritime influence over the land, dissipating hot spots and minimising precipitation.

“The ripening process was seven days earlier than normal years, with great healthiness in the fruit, no rainfall, and no Botrytis – the main enemy in Leyda Valley, because of the cold foggy weather,” Navarette told db.

“In general we had 2% higher yields, and the wines are beautiful, perfumed with nice crispy-vibrant palates. So far, lovely wines”.

Last year Chile recorded a harvest up 36% to 12.9mhl versus the previous year, according to stats published by the OIV in November, a welcome boost after two years of low production.

Pioneering Pinot Noir

The wine brand, which was one of the first companies to plant in the cold and extreme region, is currently working on a project to better understand the soils for Pinot Noir, a variety Navarette says has great potential in Chile, now that winemakers have succeeded in discovering soils that better suit the grape, and taking advantage of the influence of the Humboldt current to plant along the country’s 4,000km coastline.

“About 18 years ago Chilean wineries started to specialize its work in Pinot Noir, planting vineyards in the correct terroir that were the best match for this grape,“ she said. “Nowadays you can find great exponents from Leyda valley but also from Elqui, Limari and Malleco in the south.”

Grapes are also being harvested earlier, with lower alcohol levels, greater vibrancy and less oak which increases the purity of the fruit.

“This fine-tuning has allowed the Chilean wine industry to start working seriously in Pinot Noir, giving birth to great exponents,” she said. “I have great expectations as the best vineyards planted have 20-10 years as an average, so the older and more balanced the vines get, the better wine quality we can obtain.”

Viña Leyda has been working with renowned wine consultant and winemaker Dr Pedro Parra, a leading figure in the new Chile and Argentinean wine movement and an expert on terroir, on deep soil research to select the best soils to craft its Pinot Noirs.

“These help us in getting a deeper comprehension of our place and terroir in the valley,” she said.

It started with electo-conductivity analysis in 2015, along with geo-reference mapping in the vineyards which were combined by software to show the precise points in the vineyards to dig soil pits to understand textures and soil composition, characterise them and vinify the wine separately.

“In that way we finally could make the link between soil composition and wine style,” she said. “

“We learnt that we had to craft wines showing our granitic soils, the ‘mother rock’ of the Coastal Mountain Range where we are located, which give birth to vibrant energetic wines. We discovered soils with limestone (calcium carbonate) that came from the Andes Mountain, which give birth to mineral and sinewy textured wines, as well as silt soils that originate wines with firm, long palates with grip.”

One of the main discovers was that there were two different types of clays, one coming from the Andes Mountain and the other coming from the Coastal Mountain Range, she added.

The company has also adopted different techniques to improve its Sauvignon Blanc, a non traditional whites varieties for Chile, working with whole clusters during pressing to create creamier wines with fuller palates, using cold filled tanks, and playing with battonage before fermentation to increase the amount of Tiols and improves texture in palate.

“We’re also working more with concrete and casks of 2,000 litres with no toasting to get a little bit of micro oxygenation in Sauvignon Blanc, which definitely helps in bringing the texture up,” Navarette explains. “What we are trying to do is not only craft Sauvignon with beautifulland clean fruit expression but trying to focus more in the palate which is very difficult to build in a Sauvignon.”