Ventisquero Wine Estates celebrates 10 years of Tara

Ventisquero Wine Estates (VWE) recently hosted a special tasting celebrating 10 years of Tara, bringing its Atacama Desert wines to London palates.

The tasting showcased VWE’s small-production hand-crafted wine from the world’s driest desert, The Atacama. The goal, aside from celebrating a decade of winemaking, was to illustrate how wines grown in non vine-friendly territory are generating interesting styles oenophiles will not find elsewhere.

Winemaker Alejandro Galaz, who hosted the tasting, helped attendees discover the full range of Tara wines, including verticals in an effort to illustrate how the wine has evolved and was also pouring VWE’s newly-released 2021 sauvignon blanc along with three chardonnay vintages and three pinot noir bottlings.

Speaking to db, Galaz said: “We made an in-depth study of the soils to see where the highest content of limestone was, as these kinds of soils are not common in Chile. The results showed a little area around one hectare, in the second terrace of the Huasco river in the Atacama Desert that was planted with Sauvignon Blanc.”

Galaz explained: “We vinified this separately and the resulting wine was tighter, more linear, with a longer persistence and more structure. We decided to bottle this separately, and make it a Tara wine. Vintage variation doesn’t really apply in the Atacama Desert, so harvesting happens every year at almost exactly the same dates.”

VWE is reportedly the only winery producing a commercially-available wine in that area and has declared that its soil is so saline that visitors to the vineyard can actually see the salt crystals sitting on top of the earth.