Viña VIK: ‘like people, wine develops’
Ahead of its release on La Place de Bordeaux, Chile’s Viña VIK talks to db about its latest 2022 vintage release, its unique approach to capturing terroir and the potential of Chile’s Cabernet Franc. Arabella Mileham reports.
Viña VIK’s journey is a relatively young one. It started with the idea to create a great wine that “speaks of the place, of the time [and] of the soul of this [the Cachapoal] valley” according to chief winemaker Christian Vallejo. “With time we came to understand that wine also speaks to you, if you know how to listen, getting to know the terroir.”
The first VIK was born in 2009, originally containing all five varieties grown across the estate (Cabernet Sauvignon, Carménère Syrah, Merlot and Cabernet Franc), but was subject to several tweaks before its assemblage settled on just two – Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. This turning point occurred in 2013, but five years later, the proportion of Cabernet Franc, originally a secondary grape, started to increase steadily after showing “its full potential: elegant, complex, vibrant”, Vallejo says.
“Like people, wine develops,” Vallejo’s colleague, VIK’s winemaker Priscilla Fernandez explained to db during a recent visit to the winery in Cachapoal this summer. “This is why VIK has changed during its history.”
She points out that 2021 saw the proportions of the blend finally inverted, with Cabernet Franc leading for the first time, “a decision that summarised years of searching, experimenting and testing”, according to Vallejo.
It is, agreed Fernandez, “a long process to define the best blend”.
“The vineyards are managed focused on the labels,” she explains. “Wine starts life in the field, but the composition isn’t only in the field”.
There has been a lot of work in the vineyard to evolve the Cabernet Franc to allow it to take centre stage, for example its maturity is less consistent across the bunches than, say, Cabernet Sauvignon, and the shoulders and tails of the bunches tend to be more green (“if you see the bunch in the field, the different colours are evident” she says). As a result, the team make small cuts in the firld to ensure equal maturity across the bunches and thus greater precision in the wines.
“Cabernet Franc as a variety has evolved a lot since we first harvest it and it was a bet to say ‘ why not!’ and change the proportion – but it was the best assemblage for that year,” she told db during our visit. However, she admits that “it might change eventually, in time.”
The 2022 vintage – which has been aged in barrels for 26 months, is “a serious wine” despite feeling young, Fernandez explains “It has much minerality and the fruit is more elegant and the tannins present”, with a “dynamic finish”.
Expansion of the terroir concept
VIK’s terroir-focus is expanded by the unique take it has on using locally sourced clay, wood and flowers in the production of the wine – known as amphoir, barroir and fleuroir – to enhance the wines. These are key pillars of the VIK 2022 vintage, Fernandez explains. Fleuroir captures indigenous yeasts from wild flowers grown in the valley, primarily Alstroemerias (a Peruvian Lily native to south America, although cultivars are popular in gardens across the UK). The petals are harvested and dried in the sun with the aim of transferring naturally occurring yeasts that direct to the wine, thereby complementing the natural yeasts of the grapes themselves and enhancing the sense of terroir.
“We are looking for the more neutral flowers in terms of aromas – we pick a lot of flowers to test,” Fernandez explains. “There were a lot of factors to select them, one was the aromas, the other was the yeasts and the Alstroemerias were found to be the best for this task.”
The wines go through a gentle extraction with repeated gentle pumpovers rather than fewer more extractions. Post-fermentation maceration follows and then the juice is separated from the skins. Malolactic conversion is done in barrel, tank and amphora, depending on the profile of the wines required, with around 40% of the blend later aged in amphoras made from locally sourced clay. The amphoras “helps keep the tension and minerality in the wine,” Fernandez explains.
Originally, only stainless steel tanks were used for malolactic conversion, however this changed with the advent of the ‘barrior’ project in 2018, when the team decided to not only make their own barrels, using staves imported from France, but to toast them using the logs cut from fallen Chilean oak trees that grow in the valley. This Chilean oak toasting imparts “more of the terroir” and doesn’t have the presence of the French oak in the ageing, Fernandez says.
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Prior to the development of the barroir process, the team used a catalogue to pick their toast, but the problem was that “they’d come here however, we couldn’t control it as much. Once we learnt how to assemble the barrels, we started to control factors that we hadn’t thought of,” Fernandez explains.
“We are the only ones to toast with their own oak, it’s unique,” Fernandez explains. “It precisely allows us to add more ‘friendly’ and respectful flavours in the wine. The idea is to make a difference with the flavours of the toast – sometimes people use the toast and you get predictable flavours, the idea is to get out of these predictable flavours and get something from the Cachapoal Valley.”
A relatively low toast is used as “we want the barroir present in the wine, but we don’t’ want a smoky wine,” she says, and each of the winery’s three principal lines that use the barroir technique – VIK, La Piu Belle and Milla Calla – each have their own special toasting regimen, depending on the forest, the grain of the wood and the intensity and time in the flame.
The process is more environmentally friendly and helps the winery cut its carbon footprint , not only as importing staves is more space-efficient than importing barrels, but each barrel is reused up to three time, and then stripped down and retoasted.
“We can do something more specific for each line and give the potential of every wine using this techniques,” she says.
Expansion
This idea of a broadened terroir concept is being expanded and the winery is experimenting with a variation of its barroir’ technique, inspired by volcanic radiation. This involves a new process whereby stone from Cachapoal – local ‘Lucita’ identified by a geologist – are heated up, the heat, energy and radiation being used to heat and toast the barrels.
“It uses the example of volcanic stones, which radiate energy and heat – and we’re doing the same [process] with the Lucita, which was found here to mimic the action of the volcanic rock,” Fernandez explains. The idea is to reuse the stones more than once to impart this radiation.
“We have created this new idea,” Fernandez said. “It’s so different.”
Cabernet Franc
Although Carménère may be the “emblematic” variety of Chile, if you’re looking for complexity and structure, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon are the varieties to watch, Fernandez insists. And at VIK, Cabernet Franc is increasingly in focus, highlighted in three of its key labels, its eponymous VIK label, La Piu Belle (‘the most beautiful one’ in Italian) and its innovative new wine, Stonevik.
“The condition, temperature and the soil characteristics are very specific to the geography between the coastal mountains and the Andes, so there is great diversity of Cabernet France here,” she explains. “The idea of Cabernet France for us is to provide us with many results – it is a diverse variety of wine, with different results, minerality and linearity.”
Depending on the area, whether coming from the coastal range or the Andes, and the wine itself, “the Cabernet Franc might introduce itself differently,” she continues. “[In Colchagua] we highlight the tension and the tannins are more present, but not in an aggressive way.”
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