Chapter 5 - Repopulating the Hill

“We are slowly repopulating this hill,” Zjos said with her typical warm smile. Teresa, her youngest, was strapped to her back. Emilia, the eldest, read quietly nearby, while Mathis and Esteban, her two boys, chased Almendra, the dog. It was siesta. The presses were still. We lay on the sun deck outside the bodega, the Pacific Ocean glinting in the distance.

We were just beyond the official limits of the Itata Valley, in Cobquecura, a small fishing town on Chile’s southern coast. Once lively, the town changed forever in 2010, when an 8.8-magnitude earthquake triggered a tsunami that tore through its center, flattening buildings and erasing the schist walls that had long marked the land.

Leo, a young Chilean winemaker, first came to Cobquecura on a weekend away with Zjos, an even younger Belgian researcher. They fell in love - Zjos with Leo, Leo with the slate-stacked walls that hinted at what lay beneath the surface. Schist in the soil. And where there is schist, there is terroir.

Soon after, they bought a hilltop just outside town, planting new vines and building their winery and home from the ground up. The land proved fertile. Vines took hold in the fractured rock, vegetables flourished in the garden, Almendra had puppies, and the Erazo family grew.

Today, Leo and Zjos farm vineyards old and new across Cobquecura and Itata while running the bodega, the farm, and a household of six. The terrain is steep, the climate unforgiving. Storms have torn through what they built; fires have burned their vines. Yet they rebuild, each time growing stronger, raising four children alongside the land.

Their story is one of balance - between old and new, tradition and innovation, instinct and science. It is a story of survival, not in spite of the place, but because of it. Their story is, unmistakably, the story of Itata.