Red Wine N°1 2021 | Tara | Atacama

The winery was founded by the Chilean businessman Gonzalo Vial in 1998, planting the first vines at the Trinidad property in coastal Maipo. The cellar went up in 1999 and the name is a tribute to the glaciers of Chilean Patagonia: ventisquero means exactly that. The first harvest came with the turn of the millennium and the first wines were released in 2001, with Felipe Tosso as head winemaker and the Australian John Duval consulting.

In 2008 the house made two opposite moves in the same year: it entered the cool coastal Leyda Valley, and planted its first vines in the Huasco Valley, in the middle of the Atacama Desert. That is where the Tara project was born, with the Nicolasa and Longomilla parcels some twenty kilometres from the Pacific on saline soils. The name comes not from a glacier but from a salt flat: the largest in Chile.

The other range we carry, Grey, does go back to the ice —it is named after the Grey glacier in Torres del Paine— and works the opposite way to Tara: instead of exploring new territory, it bottles specific vineyard blocks separately.

In between there are vineyards in coastal Maipo, Casablanca, Colchagua, Leyda and Huasco.