Chile

Chile is geographically sealed. The Atacama desert to the north, the Andes to the east, the Pacific to the west and Patagonian ice to the south have kept phylloxera out, which means most Chilean vines are planted on their own roots rather than grafted onto American rootstock. It is one of very few countries where that is true at scale.

For a long time the country's shape was read north to south, as a temperature gradient. The more useful reading is east to west. A cross-section from the coast to the Andes passes through a cool, foggy coastal range, a warm dry central valley and a high, bright Andean edge, and those three bands differ more from each other than places 300 kilometres apart on the same band. The official system was reorganised in 2011 to name them: Costa, Entre Cordilleras and Andes.

Carmenère is the national curiosity. A Bordeaux grape that nearly disappeared in France after phylloxera, it survived in Chile misidentified as merlot until DNA work in 1994 separated the two. It ripens very late, and picked early it tastes green and pyrazinic. Picked properly it is dark, savoury and peppery.

Chile's reputation for reliable value at the low end was earned and is now a problem, because it anchors what buyers will pay. The interesting Chilean wine of the last fifteen years is elsewhere: old dry-farmed país and cinsault bush vines in Itata and Maule, coastal sauvignon blanc from Leyda and Casablanca, and syrah from Elqui and Limarí in the far north.