Garage Wine Company Pais Carinena Single Ferment Series 2021

Type: White
Country: Chile
Region: Sauzal and Truquilemu
Grape Variety: Pais, Carignan
Viticulture: Certified Organic
Ratings: 92 Robert Parker Points

Climate: Sauzal: The summers are comfortable and arid; the winters are long, cool, and dry; windy and mostly clear year round. Truquilemu: Mediterranean climate with warm, dry summers and cool, wet winters
Terroir: Grapes are produced from 150+ years old bush head vines that are grown on granitic soils or subsoils
Winemaking: Red grapes made white by first pressing Pais, whole bunches, lightly and letting the juice start to ferment; later Carignan is picked, immediately pressed whole cluster, and the juice is poured on top of the already-fermenting Pais juice in closed-top fermenter; once dry the wine stays on its lees for 8 weeks and we stir up the lees with a paddle once a week then aged in stainless steel; bottled unfined/unfiltered with minimal So2

Color: Straw yellow in colour with golden hue
Nose: Distinctive nose, with earthy aromas and spice
Palate: Margarita-like citrus palate with a saline tang and crisp concise finish

About the Winery:
Garage Wine was literally started in a garage in 2001, by Etobicoke expat Derek Mossman and his wife Pilar Miranda. Since then, the dynamic duo handcrafted wines from a series of individual vineyards located in the Maule and Itata Valleys, in the south of Santiago, Chile.

Garage Wine Co makes wines from a series of individual parcels, small lots/bottlings of 8-22 barrels that include a series of dry-farmed field blends of Carignan, Garnacha, Monastrell, País, Cinsault and Cab Franc grown on pre-phylloxera rootstock with small farmers in the Maule and Itata. Each wine is from a 1-2 hectare parcel in a different place.

Over the years working in the community they have raised a veritable posse of vineyard hands whose skills are working the vineyards the old way / the traditional way– originario. The vineyards are on the old coastal range of mountains closer to the Pacific and have granitic soils with cracks for roots to get deep down into.

Derek and Pilar think the farming practices that have evolved over generations have as much to do with the wines’ personalities as the soils. All the wines are made by hand with native yeasts in small tanks, punched down manually and pressed out in a small basket press. The Garage Wine Company is still very much a DIY operation and we still tow much of the crop back to the winery in trailers behind trusty pickup trucks 2,000 kilos at a time.