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“Too much vigor and it’ll be green forever,” he says.
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“Low yields, along with dry conditions with easy draining soils, are the keys to getting Carmenère that’s ripe, round and not green,” says veteran winemaker Aurelio Montes, who has been working with the grape since the time when everyone thought it was Merlot. The French were right to eradicate it, they say, and the Chileans are foolish for trying to make Carmenère into something it’ll never be: a world-class varietal wine.Ĭarmenère requires sun-drenched, dry growing conditions and minimal late-season rains so that crops can ripen well into May (the equivalent of November in the Northern Hemisphere).īased on those core requirements, Carmenère ripens best in places like Apalta and Marchigue in Colchagua, Peumo in Cachapoal, Huelquén in the Alto Maipo, Pencahue in the Maule Valley and Panquehue in the Aconcagua Valley.Īlso, if soils are too fertile, the vines can overproduce, leading to vegetal aromas and flavors. Naysayers believe the wines are too loaded with olive and green characteristics to ever draw a serious following. It’s for the better if, like many in the Chilean wine community assert, Carmenère has positive attributes as a varietal red wine or as a component in Cabernet-led blends. Given that about 98% of the world’s Carmenère exists in Chile, the grape is already inextricably part of the country’s wine identity, for better or worse. Yet today, Carmenère-known for its deep color, plush tannins and unique, spicy aromas and flavors-is poised to pass Merlot and become Chile’s second most widely planted red variety after Cabernet Sauvignon. Originally imported from Bordeaux, Carmenère can be green and herbaceous if the grapes aren’t picked fully ripe-hence the uneven reputation of Chilean “Merlot” in the early 1990s. Thousands of acres that the Chileans had long thought were Merlot were actually an obscure variety called Carmenère. Two decades ago, Jean-Michel Boursiquot, a French ampelographer hired to help wineries in Chile’s Maule Valley determine what grape varieties were in their oldest vineyards, dropped a bombshell on his clients.