Garage Wine Co. - VIGNO Cariñena Truquilemu Vineyard 2018

There are three Carignan/Cariñena wines from the same vineyard in Truquilemu in 2018, and the 2018 Vigno comes from a section further down along the creek where there's terrific drainage and thus low yield and concentration. It's Carignan with smidgens of País and Monastrell in the field blend, the grapes grown by a mall farmer by hand and horse with traditional methods of dry-farming, uncertified organic for 75+ years. Like all the rest, it fermented in open-top vats with indigenous yeasts and matured in used barrels over two winters. None of these wines are about the process, they are about the place and the year. In 2018, the wine finished with 13% alcohol, a pH of 3.2 and seven grams of acidity, parameters that talk about a wine with moderate ripeness and vibrant freshness, from a cooler year in a cool part of Maule. 3,336 bottles produced. It was bottled in January 2020.

There are now 16 different wines produced by Garage Wine Co., one of my favorite producers in Chile. I tasted two vintages from each of their wines (so a lot of bottles), mostly 2018 and 2019, some of the best wines they have ever produced. They now farm 36 hectares of vineyards, sell some premium grapes to well-known wineries and produce their own wines. They are dynamic, and there are always new things, like their first Cru bottlings, what they say is a cut above the single-vineyard wines.

Tasting Garage Wine Co. wines is always an exciting moment, as the wines have strong personalities and are among the best produced in Chile, and Derek Mossman's explanations are always amusing, enriching and fun. I reproduced a lot of the stuff he told me about their wines in my tasting notes, because I thought it was worth sharing. Many of these wines start off earthy and sometimes reductive and benefit from the time in the glass and possibly decanting in advance.

There are always many changes in places, Caliboro, fermentations, more stems in some of the wines, more concrete, more tinaja, amphora and foudre, less extraction, gentler vinifications, the business, Pilar is now the CEO of the company, some new wines, Cabernet from the south and what they call their Cru after 14 years in Maule. In essence, they just say, "We revive old vineyards, practicing regenerative farming—to grow tastier fruit."