Published in Decanter Magazine, July 2019
The name Morandé is synonymous with the Casablanca Valley in Chile, where pioneering winemaker Pablo Morandé has joined forces with his son, Pablo Jr, to recreate, reinvent and rediscover wines from the country’s past. Amanda Barnes interviews them (PDF Pablo Morande Interview).
Pablo Morande is a man with an acute sense of time. ‘I was 20 years too early,’ he explains, thumbing his straw hat as we sit in his Casablanca home under the shade of a cork tree. ‘It’s not always good to be the first.’ We’re talking about how Morandé pioneered Chile’s first coastal vineyard in 1982 – almost a decade before anyone else came to the party. His belief that viticulture could be successful in Casablanca turned out to be right, and it has since become one of the New World’s most respected wine regions.
However, in the early 1980s, Morandé’s visionary attitude wasn’t entirely welcome.
One step ahead
Morandé began his career in the early 1970s, as Chile headed into the Pinochet era, working for Concha y Toro. The winery was producing 500,000 cases of wine a year (a mere fraction of its 33 million today) and needed a white wine to compete with California on the export market. ‘I knew white wines needed a cooler climate, and the coolest that I had was Maipo,’ Morandé laughs about the region renowned for its hearty reds. ‘So I spent two years looking for potential sites.’
He considered the historic, southern wine region of Bío Bío and the virgin coastal territories of San Antonio, Limarí and Casablanca. The latter three zones were strictly cattle territory and had never been imagined for viticulture, nor did any climate data exist. But with the help of a professor at his former university, Morandé plotted out a series of triangles that linked climate data from major cities in the region and made estimations on the climate of the rural land between the pinpointed cities. The two surmised that Casablanca would be mild enough for grape growing.
‘Everyone said it was impossible, that we were too close to the sea and that our triangle was wrong,’ Morandé explains with a glint in his eye – evidently still energised by the challenge…
Read the full interview in Decanter’s July edition.
While the day time temperatures and sunny climes make Casablanca a perfect holiday destination, the cooler nights mean you won’t lose any hours of sleep and can still rest nicely with a big blanket — which is good news for both people and grapes. The big difference in temperature from the sunny, skin ripening days compared to the crisp nights is what makes these wines so racy. And in the morning when you do finally wake from a perfect slumber, a fresh fog lays over the valley keeping the grapes cool and not awakening them too rudely either. The sun slowly appears through the fog, and then we are back to sunbathing. I understand why grapes do so well here: they can rest at night, and get some color during the day. And that is the secret to the success of cool climate wines … maintaining the cool acidity while developing their color, sugar and flavor profiles in the summery afternoons.
