Garage Wine Company Pais 215 Single Ferment Series 2021

Type: Red
Country: Chile
Region: Sauzal and Truquilemu
Grape Variety: 100% Pais
Viticulture: Certified Organic

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: Vines grow on granite soils
Winemaking: Fermented naturally, caps were punched down by hand and pressing was strictly manual. The wine was barreled in neutral oak over two winters and then bottled in recycled glass. Unfined and unfiltered

Color: Light red
Nose: Sweet fruit and slightly earthy notes
Palate: Light and lively with airy, completely soft tannins and a mild fruit acidity, which beautifully balances the mild fruit sweetness

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.