Wine Country, Chilean Style

We rented a car in Santiago so we could see wine country. Santa Cruz is a couple hours south of Santiago and is one of the more famous wine regions in a country full of wine regions. On the way out of town, we toured the Viña Aquitania winery. It's a small organic winery. The tour guide was really good and the wine was even better.

Santa Cruz itself is not much to look at. But it's a fertile valley and there's wineries everywhere in the region. We stayed at a nice place in town at a private courtyard with a grape arbor and fantastic breakfasts.

Our friend Teresa from Santiago recommended many places for us to visit. Also, our friend Louie had been to one in the area and we went to it (Clos Apalta) since it was recommended by both. It's a high-end winery that has won many awards over the years. It was a private, unscheduled tour.

The owners must have spent millions developing the winery. It's built into a granite hill and uses gravity to move the wine down through multiple levels. The most amazing part was the owner's private cellar, which is deep in the granite hill. It looks like the private lair of a James Bond villain. Wines in this region are mostly reds, particularly Carmenere and Cabernet Sauvignon.

The next day we did just a tasting at a nearby winery called Laura Hartwig. All the tastings were great except one that I knew I might not like. Orange wines are kind of a thing in Europe now. It's a white grape and the skins are left on during the fermentation. It's different than a rose and it's a little astringent. That's about the only one I didn't really care for.

On our last day we went to a recommended museum in town. Wow! What a surprise. It's a world class museum and probably one of the best in Chile. Apparently there is a really rich arms dealer from Santa Cruz who spent a lot of his money developing this museum. It covers prehistory all the way through modern Chilean history.

I've been to many museums in Peru that highlighted that region's pre-columbian civilizations. But this museum had an amazing collection of pottery and artifacts from each of those cultures in one building.

I'd heard a little bit about the Pacific War when I was in Bolivia years ago. Basically, Chile fought against Bolivia and Peru in the 1880's and won the war of the Pacific and that's how they got the top 20% of their land. Bolivia used to have a port to the sea and lost it during that war. Bolivia and Paraguay are now the only landlocked countries in South America.

Afterwards, we drove about 2 1/2 hours northwest of Santa Cruz to stay in a village on the Pacific coast. We have about 4 more days on this trip and after 2 more beach days, we'll go to Valparaiso for our last stop.

More photos and videos are here.

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