Check out the excellent hotels in Mendoza and Buenos Aires we’ll be staying at. Get ready for a Tango dinner show and lessons. We will be meeting with wine industry professionals and touring wineries with different business models.
Take a look at the key dates and deadlines, the costs and the itinerary, and let me know if you have any questions.
Unfortunately, this class will only be offered if at least 12 students make their $100 Airfare Deposit Payment by Friday, September 20th. If you are interested in this class/trip, then please invite other students and non-students to come to Argentina with you.
Thanks so much to everyone who was a part of The Global Wine Industry’s study abroad class–students, planners, guides, and hosts.
Chile’s wine industry has proven it’s ability to make world-class wines. The Internet is changing how wineries are communicating with customers, and while Chile has thought of itself as an isolated island, these are exciting times in the wine industry because now anyone can connect to a Chilean winery through a Google search or through social network word of mouth. It’s exciting to see Wines of Chile and Movi creating digital content. It will be more exciting to see individual wineries and writers start to do the same with WordPress, twitter, iTunes, or whatever. Thank you everyone on our itinerary for teaching us about your part in Chile’s wine industry.
Thank you students. I hope this trip/class motivated you in some way. Use that motivation to do whatever it is you want to do now…don’t wait.
http://Chile2010cs.blogspot.com Nice pictures at Kross in your post Chris. What’s up with the video in your Day 6 post? It’s not loading. Let me know if I can help. Thanks for adding the pictures to the flickr group.
Chile has to export a lot of wine because it produces more wine than it consumes domestically. It takes a lot of work as is very challenging for wineries to get their wine in front of consumers in a foreign market–at a hotel, restaurant, supermarket, etc.
Last year we met with two very talented export managers in Chile and this year we met with two more. They have all been young, male, trilingual+, studied abroad, smart, and travel a lot. Most of them have also been from Chilean wine families. Fernando Vargas and Andres Gillmore last year. Fernando Pavon and Rodrigo Lewinson this year.
I was excited to taste through some Chilean pinot noir, so I got 4 bottles at the supermarket in Santiago.
Chile’s climate is very similar to California’s, so there are a lot of cool coastal regions. Pinot Noir is not that common though in Chile, but after tasting through 4 of them I think that Chilean pinot noir from Casablanca, San Antonio, and other cool climate regions have lots of potential.
The best (and most expensive) I tasted was the 2006 Casa Marin Litoral Vineyard from Lo Abarca-San Antonio. Very complex and tasty. The San Pedro Castillo de Molina pinot noir was also a really nice light-colored fruity wine.
I didn’t hear about Casa Marin on my trip to Chile a year ago. Everyone was excited about Casa Lapostolle because of their Wine Spectator #1 wine of the year award. But, Casa Marin might be the real deal. Chileans know of Casa Marin for its proximity to the coast. Maria Luz Marin was at the Annual Wines of Chile Awards that The Global Wine Industry was at, and she asked a question about marketing and the panel told her to use the Internet to connect with customers…
In the “otros cepages” (other red varietals) section there was a cabernet franc, petit verdot, carignan, sangiovese, nebbiolo, and that was it. I was surprised not to find the Spanish varietals tempranillo and granacha on the shelves at the supermarket, Mundo Del Vino, or Enoteca (in Vina del Mar).
Patricio Tapia met with the group a few days ago and said that it would be interesting to do a tasting on Chilean carignan. He just wrote a blog post today about a Chilean carignan he tried recently.
The 2008 Santa Carolina carignan and the 2006 De Martino carignan were really good. The 2004 Orzada Odfjell carignan might have been a bad bottle, and the 2006 Santa Ema Amplus carignane was a little too raisny/chocolate/overripe tasting.
Check out this video of the old rauli tanks, the old bottling equipment, the old European architecture, and wine from old vintages at Cousino-Macul.
Yesterday we got to visit one of the old wineries outside of Santiago and to hear from Victoria Cousino–7th generation family member of the Cousino family. It was fun to hear about Chile’s history and the Cousino family’s history.
Victoria said that the Cousino-Macul website is going to be redesigned soon and that she manages the facebook page and that her brother does the tweeting. It will be cool to see what the winery’s website redesign looks like!
After seeing WordPress blogs from Wines of Chile, Movi, and Patricio Tapia I hope that the class recognizes the importance of digital content and the Internet in wine pr, wine marketing, and wine communications.
We had an interesting meeting with Sven Bruchfeld from Movi today, the organization that is trying to gain support from some of the 8% of Chilean wineries that are not part of Wines of Chile. Movi is a winery organization in Chile for small wineries whose owners manage the winery. Sven said that there is no concrete definition of small, but that he thinks after 30,000 cases/year, it becomes difficult for a single person to be involved in all aspects of a winery.
The meeting with Sven started out by asking how we found out about Movi. I don’t know if it was a google search on Chile wine blog or a tweet from someone in the chile-wine twitter list I started, but The Austral Group got us together without ever talking or emailing.
Movi currently has 17 wineries onboard, and has a lot of other wineries waiting on the sidelines to see what happens. The Global Wine Industry visited Gillmore last year and had a great time. Their vines are dry farmed, their bottles had artistic labels drawn by a family member, they had pumas at the winery, and the tour was given in 100 degree weather by a family member that was pregnant. If all Movi wineries can offer the same experience as Gillmore winery to customers I think Movi has a lot of potential.
I asked them if they’ve thought about attending the Wine Bloggers’ Conference or other independent-minded wine events and Sven said that Movi is so new that they haven’t gotten that far yet.
Movi has a WordPress blog and a twitter account (@MoviChile). The WordPress blog is a good start, their icon is cool, but I guess the whole point behind Movi is to get past wines that are branded to look authentic and to connect consumers and trade to wineries that are the Davids fighting the Goliaths.
Sven also told us that there are 3 people making Kosher wine in Chile and that there is no good Chilean zinfandel. Good luck with Movi and Polkura Sven!
