National Chilean Wine Day!

In our Co-Founder Julio’s home country of Chile, today they’re celebrating “National Wine Day,” rejoicing in the amazing vinos they produce.

We’ll be celebrating too! From 5 to 8pm tonight, we have reps from 4 producers pouring 8+ wines from Chile. The Chilean Embassy is helping us host the event as well!

It might seem like Chilean wine came out of nowhere, but they’ve been making wine for a long time. Like, over 400 years long. Here’s some more of our favorite facts about Chilean wine to ponder en el Dia del Vino!

Chile’s unique geography plays a huge part in their wine production. Perhaps most significantly, they remain the only winemaking country in the world that’s never been hit with pheloxora. It’s basically a landlocked island with the Andes to the east, Atacama desert to the north, Pacific ocean to the west, and glaciers to the south. That coupled with very strict customs controls has kept them from the wrath of the wine world’s most feared pest.

Though it’s signature grape, the super delicious, unique carménère originally hails from Bordeaux, every planting in the world has descendants in Chile. The world thought it had lost carménère to pheloxora in the late 19th century. Luckily, it had already made its way to Chile, where producers thought they had a strange clone of merlot. They realized their mistake in the mid ‘90s. Now, carménère does grow in low quantities once again in Bordeaux. But all of it from Chilean clippings!

As recently as the 1980s, nearly all wine Chile produced, they drank theyselves. Now, over 70% of production gets exported, mostly to the US, UK, Canada, and China.