| Viña Undurraga,
Santiago, Chile |
December 3, 2002 |
Today we visited the famous
Viña Undurraga vineyard located south of Santiago, Chile.
Undurraga has been producing red and white wine since 1885 and
is one of the finest names in Chile.
Most of you faithfull readers are most likely familiar with the Undurraga
name and taste.
Fortunately for us, Undurraga arranges visits to their vineyard every
day, allowing us to check out their facilities as well as tasting some
of their better red and white wines.
The tour group consisted of us, another Danish girl with her british
boyfriend and one bi-lingual guy, doing the translation. |
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| The Grapes |
The Viña Undurraga estate |
The grapes used for Undurraga wine
was originally imported from France in the early days.
In the meantime, France has been suffering from serious attacs of a
grape plague, eliminating several of the original sorts.
Fortunately Chile has been spared from this plague, saving many of
the original French sorts.
Due to the frequent attacks of the plague in France, the maximum life
of the plant in France is around 20 years.
In Chile, the different sorts can survirve up to 100 years.
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| Processing the grapes. |
The Undurraga grapes. |
Originally, the juice from the grapes
was extracted by having people stamping around, barefoot in a huge tray,
allowing their foot sweat to mix with the juice :-).
This procedure has been abandoned many years ago and now the juice
is pressed out of the harvested grapes by means of a hydraulic presse.
When doing white wine, the juice is filterd before fermentation, whereas
for red wine, the grape peel is left for color. It is then left in enormous
metal tanks for 6 months, after which time the better wines are stored
in oak barrels. |
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| The final storage. |
The Hydralic Grape pressing machine. |
The very best wines get brand new
barrels - the second best wines then inherit the barrels the following
4 years.
The Barrels are made from French and American oak and cost US $ 700,
explaining the high price for the fine wines.
After 4 years of usage, the barrels are sold to other companies, using
them for storage of e.g. Pisco.
After that, many of the used barrels end up in gardens as flower pots.
In the Undurraga basement, thousands of these barrels were used for
storing the wine.
The annual production at Undurraga is 15 million bottles, equalling
some 15 million wine plants. |
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| www.doos.com (c) JRa
26.11.2002 raarup_explorer@hotmail.com |
Final storage. |
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