Chilean winery Los Boldos launches Chile’s first Touriga Nacional

Chilean winery Viña Los Boldos, part of the Sogrape Group, has launched a Touriga Nacional, which it says is the first time Portugual’s most famous grape has been grown in Chile.

Los Boldos’s chief winemaker, Victor Acre

For Los Boldos’s chief winemaker Victor Arce, who joined the company in 2016, the wines are a perfect marriage between Chile & Portugal, which provided the opportunity to create a different wine for Chile, a new style for the variety and find a connect Chile with the company’s Portuguese roots.

It is, he says “a good marriage”.

The partnership with the Sorgrape Group formed the backbone for the project – the estate started out with only 2 blocks (0.22 ha) of hand-grafted vines from Portugal, from which it produced its first vintage in 2017.  Planting has since been expanded to around 3.6ha and since 2018, Arce has produced a rosé in addition to a red wine, working on the project with Sogrape’s chief operating officer and former director of oenology Miguel Pessanha and António Braga, enological director of Mateus, Vinhos Verdes and Dão wines.

According to head of marketing Santiago Palaciosbacque, the Portuguese grape produces a very different style in Chile, due to the different soils and climate in Cachapoal compared to its native Portugal.

“Our vineyard had two particular types of soil, very alluvial, not heavy, it’s very poor, very rocky and full of pebbles, very permeable soil – if you empty a glass of water on it, it will go straight down, which allows the vines to grow really deep” Palaciosbacque explains.

This, along with the proximity of the mountains and the cold weather that comes rolling down from the Andes, gives a lot of freshness and nice acidity to the wines, as well as elegant fruit and floral notes.

“Our Touriga Nacional is a really fresh style” Palaciosbacque says. “It’s not the same style as one you would find in Portugal, [where] it is very fruity – and we recommend it more chilled than traditional red wine.”

So far, the 2019 vintage has been best vintage for the Chilean Touriga Nacional, coinciding with the maturation of the six-year old vines, and the 2019 red is now being released under the new Chateau Los Boldos Especial range, along with the 2020 dry rosé. Key markets include Chile, Brazil, the UK and US, targeting the on-trade, specialist restaurant or small wine stores.

Micro-terroir

The winery is also releasing Grand Clos, a single-vineyard micro-terroir Cabernet Sauvignon icon wine from the historically warm 2017 vintage.

As Palaciosbacque points out, the estate comprises of only one vineyard so technically it is all single vineyard, however following in depth investigations of the soils in the vineyard, the team subdivided the plot into different lots and are now looking at producing a range of micro-terroir wines.

The first release if Grand Clos is a Cabernet Sauvignon 2017 that comes from block number 37, which was relased in January this year, and Victor is working on a Carmenère which will come from a different lot. But maybe in the future we could have a Cabernet Sauvignon coming from different lot to show the different type of soils.

“Although its traditional winemaking method, using French foudre and concreate eggs, the idea is to show the typical micro-climate of the soil,” Arce explains.