Alice L’Estrange Vino Tintoblanco 2023

A blend of grapes from across the Itata region in southern Chile. Made in a glou-glou style, it's crunchy, fresh, and eminently drinkable. Red berry fruits, a little smoke and savouriness.

Alice L'Estrange is an Australian winemaker who has lived and worked in central and south America for years, first in the specialty coffee trade. While working as a natural wine importer, she fell in love with small scale agriculture with a positive socio-economic impact. After making wine in South Australia for a while, she moved to Chile, where she has worked with three farmers, converting their vineyards to regenerative farming to improve climate resilience, decrease the use of chemicals, and increase quality and yield. 

The Itata Valley is a historic cool climate wine region in southern Chile, known for dry-grown, own-rooted bush vines often over 100 years old. Chile has been known over the last century for producing wines from French grapes, but regions south of Santiago hold a much longer viticultural history, with winemaking brought over by Spanish colonists in the 1500s.

Local grapes Pais (Spanish grape Listán Prieto) and Moscatel (Moscato of Alexandria), have adapted to the landscape over the last 500 years. Farmers work the soil, often using horses. While this isn't in vogue in the regenerative winemaking conversation, here it's needed to open the soil before three months of rain, and close it again to lock in moisture over the long dry season.

After years of producing bulk wine to be transported North and added to Bordeaux blends, a new wave of producers in Itata are reviving vineyards, and looking to pre-industrial winemaking techniques to make structured, elegant wines, expressive of the unique history and terroir.