Chapter 1 - El Culo Del Mundo
"There is no wifi here." Leo said. Carlos and I looked at each other, at our phones, back at Leo. "And you have to wait in the morning before the water turns on to use the bathroom. If the electricity shuts down, it is because we ran out of solar." We had just driven thirty minutes up a gravely path to the top of a hill, after having spent seven hours on a bus driving down from Santiago de Chile. I realized I had never asked Leo exactly where the winery was. "Joder. Estamos en el culo del mundo" Carlos said when Leo left us alone in the bungalow.
The Itata valley stretches 500 kilometres south of Santiago, the capital of Chile, a long narrow ribbon of land wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains, stretching from the Atacama desert all the way down to Patagonia. It took the Spanish conquistadores a couple of attempts to steal this remote land from the Mapuche who had been living there since at least 500 BC. When the Spanish finally succeeded in 1541, besides a trail of destruction and blood shed, they also left behind grapevines (a conquistador gets thirsty, you know). Ever since then, bush vines of Moscatel and País have been growing on the hills of Itata, making it one of the oldest wine regions in the world.
Despite the spectacular views, its centuries-old vineyards and its rich history, Itata is hardly known, and that is because it is truly el culo del mundo - the middle of nowhere. Just rolling hills, small plots of vineyards, gravel roads and tiny houses and small wineries dotted in between. People still travel the roads by horse, work the land by hand and sell their produce next to the road or in small village markets.
Yet it is here that the ancient knowledge of the soils and how these interact with the old bush vines, the reading of the winds and the weather coming from the Pacific or the Andes, the influence of the moon and the stars on all that lives, and the mastery of winemaking without electricity is passed on from generation to generation.
And that was what I was here for. Leo Erazo is an expert in making low intervention wines using these ancient techniques. The difference with other natural winemakers is that Leo's wines are as clean and pure as they come. No funkiness, no wild aromas, no taste of kombucha or gueuze - just the taste of the grape and the soil it grew on. So in order to learn all that, I had to survive a harvest on this remote farm on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Carlos, my new roommate and a proud Spanish winemaker joining Leo for the harvest, immediately felt at home - just like the Conquistadores.