Lapostolle

The Free Bacchus Story

Almost every producer on this site is here for something they added. Lapostolle is worth knowing for something it gave back. The estate held a full biodynamic certificate from 2011, worked that way for several years, and then began withdrawing from the certificate around 2017 — not quietly, and not because anyone caught them out.

The reason is the interesting part, and their winemaker Andrea León has given it on the record. Biodynamic farming runs on a set of preparations made from specific plants — yarrow, chamomile, oak bark, stinging nettle — and on a calendar worked out in central Europe. Applied in the southern hemisphere, in a Mediterranean valley six thousand miles away, a good deal of that has to be imported or improvised. She had doubts about doing it on faith, so the estate stopped claiming it and moved its effort to the Chilean industry's own sustainability code instead.

You can disagree with the decision and still notice what it took. Certification is a marketing asset, and giving one up costs a producer the label, the shelf talker and the easy line in the tasting note, in exchange for nothing but being able to say something they believe. That is rarer than the certificate was.

The wine that made the name is Clos Apalta, a blend of Carmenère, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon from old vines in the Apalta hills of the Colchagua Valley. Carmenère is worth a paragraph of its own: it is a Bordeaux grape that was written off as extinct after phylloxera, and turned up a century later in Chile, where growers had been cultivating it for decades in the belief that it was Merlot. James Suckling has given Clos Apalta 100 points.

What we can stand behind is the organic certificate, and only that. Ecocert's own client directory carries Domaines Bournet-Lapostolle Chile SpA at Apalta for crop farming and wine grape, under both the USDA National Organic Program and the Chilean scheme. The biodynamic record is gone from the register because the estate withdrew it, so this page does not claim it — which is exactly what Lapostolle would tell you themselves.