The story of Almaviva part I: creation and evolution

In 1997, two leading wine families, the Rothschilds and the Guilisastis, joined forces to create Almaviva, a château-concept Bordeaux blend showcasing the terroir of Chile’s Maipo Valley. In the first instalment of a two-part interview, Rafael Guilisasti and Philippe Sereys de Rothschild tell Richard Woodard how the project came about – and why Almaviva today has ‘to fight’ to maintain its status.

Almaviva in 2024 is firmly established at or near the zenith of Chilean winemaking. The first non-Bordeaux wine to be sold via La Place de Bordeaux, it has grown accustomed to the trappings of global fine wine stardom – 100-point scores, regular appearances in the glossy sale catalogues of the world’s leading wine auction houses.

But turn the clock back to Almaviva’s genesis in the mid- to late 1990s, and the possibility of such elevated achievements was far from obvious. For all its long winemaking history, Chile was only just registering on the radar of most global wine drinkers, and mainly as the source of good-value bottles for everyday drinking. A high-concept, château-focused Bordeaux blend with pricing to match its lofty ambitions… wasn’t that, at the time, a bit of a leap of faith?

“You are right, but that’s in the broad sense of things,” responds Philippe Sereys de Rothschild, chairman and CEO of Baron Philippe de Rothschild SA, owner of Château Mouton Rothschild and joint venture partner in Almaviva alongside Viña Concha y Toro. “We were looking into it with much more detail. We were looking into it as: how does Cabernet Sauvignon mature on the great terroir of Chile? We didn’t have in mind the huge ecosystem of the Chilean wine industry, ok? I think that’s really important.

“We know that Cabernet Sauvignon ripens well on the Chilean terroir. Ok, that’s a fact. Now, from that fact, can we find the right piece of land to make the quality of wine we want? In other words, a wine that ages, a wine with balance, a wine with elegance, a wine with depth, a wine with length.”

Almaviva was formally established in 1997, with its first vintage 1996, but its roots lay in a meeting between the families a couple of years earlier. “I was there from the very beginning, so I know the story,” says Rafael Guilisasti, vice chairman of Concha y Toro. “We met with Philippe’s mother [Baroness] Philippine at Vinexpo, I think it was 1995, and she showed us the stand and we started talking.”

  

Any collaborative project would have a few pre-requisites, based on the Rothschilds’ experience with Opus One, the high-end Napa Valley winery they had established with Robert Mondavi almost 20 years earlier: a château concept, a Bordeaux blend, a 50/50 joint venture.

Guilisasti continues the story: “Philippine said: ‘Ok, let’s try it, let’s see what happens. But first of all I want to be completely sure that you have the right terroir for a château concept, land for Cabernet’ – and the land for Cabernet was very important.”

That ‘land for Cabernet’ turned out to be Puente Alto in the Maipo Valley, a vinous oasis now all but consumed by the southern fringes of Santiago’s urban sprawl (Guilisasti shakes his head as he recalls how many prime vineyards were ripped out for real estate development). “The place we have in Puente Alto, we find it very unique because of the terroir, the climate, and still we believe it’s difficult to find a better place for growing Cabernet than this particular place,” he says.

“After having done Opus One,” adds Sereys de Rothschild, “we were looking for new territories, that’s very clear, and Chile became quite quickly an obvious choice, because we tasted wines that came from Chile with Cabernet Sauvignon and, as you know, we know a little bit about Cabernet Sauvignon. Very quickly we were convinced and, more importantly, we met the two families at Concha y Toro and, as Rafael says very rightly, we got on very well together.

“As we decided from the beginning that we would mirror Opus One, it had to be a 50/50 joint venture, and a 50/50 joint venture is a marriage of equals – which is actually the only marriages that work, to be honest with you.”

Even then, the decision to greenlight Almaviva was not taken lightly. “When we do something – and I think for Concha y Toro it’s the same – we don’t look five, 10 years, 15 years, we look 20, 30, 40 years. And so we have to make sure that the choice we make is the right one, because otherwise you lose 10, 20, 30, 40 years, which is a bit expensive.”

A 50/50 joint venture it may be, but Almaviva’s initial lines of demarcation were clear. “It was the Chilean terroir and French expertise, because the cellar was designed according to all the know-how and expertise coming from the French side,” explains Guilisasti. “You cannot produce a wine that does not express the terroir, but you can have a winery that expresses the best of the terroir.”

From these beginnings, Almaviva has evolved in terms of vineyard management and winemaking alike, based on painstaking research into irrigation and individual vineyard parcels, replanting where necessary. A complete renovation of the winery – which initially opened in 2000, with Almaviva’s earliest vintages vinified at Concha y Toro’s nearby facility – was completed last year.

The wine’s evolution reflects the approaches of Almaviva’s three (to date) winemakers and, in some ways, the prevailing trends in fine wine at the time. The late Patrick Léon was central to the foundation of Almaviva, and his vintages (1996-2003) lean towards that era’s bold, structured, concentrated template, with plenty of new oak on show.

Since then, both Tod Mostero (2004-07) and Michel Friou (2008 onwards) have pursued a precision viticulture approach, Mostero making at least 65 different wines from Almaviva’s 65 productive hectares of vineyard, and Friou continuing in that vein. Now elegance, depth and ageworthiness are the watchwords.

“There’s one thing that I like very much, and it’s on the Chilean and it’s on our side, is when you let the winemakers be in charge, they always look for the best possible installation to make the best possible wines,” says Sereys de Rothschild. “And what was interesting and what was fun, I would say, is that the winemakers from Concha y Toro and our winemakers said: ‘Ok, hold on, if you want us to make even better wines, then we have to have an even bigger installation because we have to have more storage, we have to have more vats, we have to have more this, we have to have more that. And I think it’s very nice, because it becomes their ambition and not only ours.”

Both Guilisasti and Sereys de Rothschild appear happy with the results, the latter describing Puente Alto’s terroir as “magical, absolutely magical”. Both also share a guarded caution about the future impact on Almaviva of climate change, stressing the importance of maintaining a watching brief without being hastily triggered into drastic action. Guilisasti expresses concerns about a potential future scarcity of water – given Almaviva’s semi-urban location, human consumption is likely to be prioritised if supplies run short.

But Sereys de Rothschild is eyeing another threat altogether – that of competition. “There’s one thing you seem to forget, which is that, when you make a great wine like that, there’s not oxygen for everybody, so you have to keep being the best, and keeping being the best is an attention of every minute of the day, because people want to be in your place, ok? Which is quite normal – other people have ambitions.

“We’ve put – or they’ve put, with our little contribution – they’ve put Almaviva where it is today, and our first ambition is to make sure that it stays where it is. And that’s quite difficult, because the higher you go to the top of the mountain, the less space there is. There are wines from Chile and wines from elsewhere.

“We have to keep our space there and we have to fight to make sure that we stay there, and I think that’s an energy of every moment, and we mustn’t forget that.”

Next week, in ‘The story of Almaviva part II: La Place and the market’, Rafael Guilisasti and Philippe Sereys de Rothschild discuss Almaviva’s La Place de Bordeaux strategy – and the primacy of the venture’s château business model.

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