Viña Tarapacá

The Free Bacchus Story

The name on this bottle comes from a divorce. The owner’s former wife renamed the vineyard for the lawyer in the split, Arturo Alessandri. He was known as the Lion of Tarapacá, and he also served as president of Chile. The name she chose, Viña Tarapacá Ex Zavala, kept her former husband in it too. Francisco de Rojas had founded the vineyard at the foot of the Andes in 1874, as Viña de Rojas, and a Zavala bought it in 1892. Its Tuscan-style mansion, built in 1927, is the emblem on the labels.

Maipo, the valley just south of Santiago, is Chile’s Cabernet country, but this wine leads with another grape. When the winery relaunched it in 2022 it was 71 per cent Carmenère, with Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon. Carmenère is a French variety that Chilean growers took for Merlot until 1994, and it makes a red that is rounder and softer than Cabernet Sauvignon, with dark fruit and a herbal, peppery edge. The winery’s own note on the organic red finds cherry, fresh strawberry and pepper, with a little vanilla from the barrel, in a juicy, medium-bodied wine. Wine Enthusiast gave the 2023 vintage 90 points and marked it a Best Buy at $20.

Tarapacá’s home since 1992 has been El Rosario de Naltahua, at Isla de Maipo, a 2,600-hectare estate closed in by the Cantillana range and the Maipo River. The organic red has been grown there before; the winery’s sheet for the 2017 vintage traces the blend to two of the estate’s soils. No organic register lists the estate today. The group farms the certified vineyards of a sister company, Viña Altair, at María Pinto, also in the Maipo Valley, and buys their organic grapes. Carmenère, Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah are among the certified vines.

In 2022 the winery moved the wine into a lighter bottle, 420 grams of glass instead of 695, with a natural cork, a capsule free of PVC and labels of recycled paper. Sebastián Ruiz, the winemaker, presented it as one step in the house’s work on sustainable viticulture and its biodiversity plan.

The certificate belongs to the bottle, not the estate. Ecocert certifies the group company, Viña San Pedro Tarapacá S.A., which trades as Viña Tarapacá among other names, and its certificate names the Gran Reserva red vintage by vintage, 2021 to 2025. All of it sits in the US category made with organic, which means at least 70 per cent organic ingredients and no USDA seal on the label. Etiqueta Azul and Etiqueta Negra, the top of the house’s range, are not on it. On the house’s own 2024 list, three wines out of fifty made up the organic line.