not-So-Pretentious Wine Reviews...except merlot.

Wine Reviews - >> Read Now

Casa Lapostolle 2| 3 | 4 | 5 | Video

Colchagua Valley, Chile – Hurtling north towards Santiago on Ruta 5, the exit for the Colchagua Wine Region ripples in the distance as burnt umber hills singed with green rise to the west and the Andes tower with volcanoes to the east. Chile feels like the long stretch of the Central Valley in California between Los Angeles and San Francisco, but with more drama. Of course, everything is written in Spanish, but for our guidebook.

We had spent the previous week in Pucon, a beautiful resort town reminiscent of Vail located eight hours south of Santiago. Located in Chile’s Lake District, Pucon is an outdoor paradise replete with mountains, lakes, trails and volcanoes. A group of us from Hoboken had decided to accompany our friend Roberto and his wife Maria on their annual pilgrimage to their homeland, and what a week we had. We went white water rafting, hiked through National Parks, enjoyed massages and thermal baths, and climbed an active volcano. We feasted on endless platters of grilled meat and seafood, enjoyed the delights of fresh summer tomatoes, and of course sampled a wide variety of wine from Chilean producers familiar and obscure.

Due to our superior planning, we had climbed the volcano on our last day in Pucon and got off to a slow start the next morning for our trip to Santa Cruz, the main city in the fertile Colchagua Valley. Tired, sore, travel weary and starved from the six-hour car drive in our tiny, rented econo-box, we were regrettably an hour late to our appointment to Casa Lapostolle. We quickly stopped at the winery to reschedule the tour for an hour later. Typical of the laid-back Chilean lifestyle, they gladly accommodated our request. Being an hour late for most anything, so it seems, is actually early in Chile.

After checking into the Santa Cruz Plaza Hotel – an upscale hotel seemingly built for the wine trade – and eating a bag of hotel nuts, we returned to Casa Lapostolle, where their Oenologist Andrea Leon greeted us with a professional, if mild weariness of gringos. Fortunately, her English far surpassed our Spanish. She gave us her business card, put on sunglasses, which made her look like a vintage starlet, and took us to see their new Clos Apalta winery located high above the valley floor. It was late January, and the new winery had only been open to visitors for a couple of weeks.

Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle and her husband Cyril de Bournet founded Casa Lapostolle in 1994 purchasing an estate full of gnarled old vines in the Colchagua Valley. Alexandra’s great-grandfather was Alexandre Marnier who created Grand Marnier in 1880 and the namesake of the winery’s Cuvée Alexander. Employing classic French winemaking techniques with the internationally renowned wine consultant Michel Rolland, Casa Lapostolle produced their first vintage in 1997. In their short history, Casa Lapostolle and Chilean wines in general have advanced tremendously, with their dedication to winemaking demonstrated by the 2001 vintage of Clos Apalta being the first Chilean wine to achieve 95 points, or “Classic” status, by Wine Spectator. That same year, Wine Spectator ranked Clos Apalta their No. 2 wine in its annual survey of their Top 100 Wines of 2004. Although part of the mission of NoMerlot.com is to debunk such arbitrary numerical rankings (really, the 2000 vintage of Clos Apalta, which was rated 94 points, isn’t a “Classic”?), you cannot deny the achievements that Casa Lapostolle has accomplished in such a short period of time.

Casa Lapostolle 2| 3 | 4 | 5 | Video