House is a restaurant in the Casablanca Valley of Chile. It is owned by the Morande winery, a pioneer who discovered a method of growing grapes in a region viewed as just too cold to produce world class wines. Thirty years later Casablanca is noted as a significant producer of world class whites, Pinots and Syrahs.
The restaurant serves gourmet meals with wine pairings that challenge the expected norms of food and wine. On our recent visit we paired a Sauvignon Blanc with butternut squash soup and a ceviche that were both graded as excellent by our party. We paired a Morande Cab Franc with a very flavorful squid ink risotto and shrimp dish cooked in its juices and lemon with Mercen spices.Mercen is indigenous to Chile and is made from dried chiles ground into a powder that is very spicy. The final dish was a chocolate brownie dessert accompanied by Morande late harvest. The blending of the Morande late harvest with a chocolate dessert with chocolate ice cream that was sheer heaven. The only problem with Morande’s House was the sheer number of wines we paired with the meals. If we had simply called it a day then it would have been perfect. However, we then ventured on to Bodegas Re, which is one of our favorites.
Bodegas Re produces fantastic Carignons using a clay amphora process that heralds from 2000 years ago. A brief visit to the barrel room featuring the clay amphoras gives a hint at what it was like to make wine over the centuries that led to the current computer controlled approaches to perfection.For the last two thousand years, wine making was more art than science and very little art at that. It was more tradition based on the fact that wine made alcohol and that was all that was important for nearly two thousand years. But today, taste, nuance and layers of flavor distinguish the wines we are willing to bring home. House broadened its approach by inviting other producers to join in their retail store sales leading to a range of Casablanca wines worthy of hold baggage on the way home. Morande has even ventured beyond Casablanca with Cab Franc and Carmenere worthy of note.
Bodegas Re has broadened its offerings since our last visit. We learned they have blended Syrah with Carignon and a Chardonnay with Carignonto create two completely unique flavors. Both piqued our interest and led us to invest in bottles we carried back with us since neither is currently available in the US.
We learned that Bodegas Re is owned by the son of the owner of Morande Winery. This was only an incidental reference and an indication that the older generation is trying to bring the next along as innovators in Chilean wines. The son has not only moved off into different production methods, but embraced a grape varietal that had been long forgotten in Chile: the Carignon grape which coincidentally had very old vines still in existence. This coincidence was a huge factor in jump-starting the movement into Chilean Carignons. The fact that old vines existed allowed harvesting current generation grapes and reaping the benefit of old grape maturity. The newer entrants into Carignon will not have this advantage and will be forced to wait for their new graftings to mature.
For anyone who enjoys whites and light reds in the form of Pinots and Syrahs, Casablanca Valley is one of the world class vineyard regions worthy of note outside New Zealand, France, Northern Italy, and California in my experience. The emerging regions appear to be South Africa, Spain and Saltain Argentina. Whether any of these regions mature to be world class remains to be seen, but based on current offerings they seem to be well along on that path.
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