From €11.89, £9.75 (£7.25 for the 2014 soonish)
Torres is not exactly a new name in wine, nor could it be described as one of the little artisan operations that we often like to champion. But this Catalan company has been way ahead of the game in many respects. It was decades ahead of its rivals into China, where it owns one of the most successful distribution companies. It has been flying the flag for sustainability for longer than most of its peers. And it is currently doing a great job recuperating forgotten Catalan vine varieties. (Four decades ago it was a pioneer in establishing international varieties in Spain.)
This family company was also extremely early into Chile. As the labels on its Chilean wines now boast, it has been operating here since way back in 1979. In fact it’s a miracle that Miguel A Torres, father of Miguel Torrres Maczassek, who was in charge of the Chilean operation (called Miguel Torres to distinguish it from the Catalan one known simply as Torres) for many recent years, was able to see the potential all that time ago.
I don’t know but Miguel A may have regretted choosing Curicó in the south as his base in the 1980s and 1990s when the epicentre of the Chilean wine business seemed much further north, but he must feel vindicated now that there is so much interest in Chile’s southern wine regions, notably Maule, where the unusual fruit for Reserva de Pueblo is grown. (The picture above, taken from Miguel Torres' website, gives a flavour of Chile but the vines are far, far more manicured than the ones responsible for this wine.)
As you can see from this 2013 wine of the week, Torres’ first attempt to tame the País grape was their pale pink sparkling Estelado 2011. But as they increasingly felt confident of their knowledge of this variety (known as Mission in California and Criolla Chica in Argentina) they have also introduced this surprisingly successful still red wine from the 2012 vintage.
As I outlined in Chile’s revolutionary new reds earlier this year, the old, unirrigated vines of Maule (and Itata) are being well and truly rehabilitated. Secano Interior (secano meaing 'dry land' or 'unirrigated') is the special DO for wines made from País or Cinsault in the area of southern Chile between the Mataquito and the Bío-Bío rivers. It was created because these two varieties were generally used to produce bulk wine and were once considered too inferior to qualify for established DOs such as Itata and Maule, and could not be mentioned on the label. (Secano Interior may also be followed by the name of certain communes, eg Coelemu or Sagrada Familia.) For bureaucratic reasons, this DO has not yet been recognised by the EU.
In that tasting article I reviewed a wide selection of some of the better wines being made from País and blends of it with other local varieties such as Cinsault. See also Chile rediscovers her old vines and The new Chile. Carbonic maceration has been harnessed to add fruit and mid palate to 95% of this sometimes too rustic variety. I admired this Reserva de Pueblo (village reserve) 2013 when I tasted it in Chile in Febuary but I think it’s tasting even better now. It seems to have gained a bit of weight. It tastes medium bodied but is only 12% alcohol – and is certified Fair Trade to boot (to summarise, the growers are treated better than average). The bottle looks far from cheap (though is not excessively heavy) and is stoppered with a handy screwcap (at least for the UK – the image below appears to show a different closure).
There is sturdy, earthy-rather-than-rustic fruit, just a suggestion of tannin on the end, and really quite an amazing amount of character and back story for a wine The Wine Society was selling for £7.50 earlier this year. (They will be selling the 2014, which I have not tasted, for just £7.25 from early February.) Last night Nick and I chose to return to a half-finished bottle of Reserva de Pueblo 2013 rather than continue with another southern hemisphere red costing £24 a bottle.
As the Torres back label says, without too much hyperbole, ‘we recovered the essence of the Chilean acient “village wines”. Those wines that remind us of the past, of our family and our roots. [Not Torres roots, surely?]
‘The village grape varieties never left; they were always there. Now they live again.’
The wine is available from various UK independents and the Finnish monopoly. The Norwegian monopoly, a Taiwanese importer and Chilean retailers have already moved on to the 2014.