Wines made from Primitivo grapes of Maipo Valley
Discover the best wines made with Primitivo as a single variety or as a blend of Maipo Valley.
From Croatia where it is called crljenak kastelanski or pribidrag. According to genetic analyses carried out by Professor Carole Meredith of California University in Davis (United States), it is related to the Croatian plavac mali and Zinfandel. It is also found in South Africa, New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Germany, Bulgaria, Albania, Italy under the name of Primitivo, Malta, Greece, Portugal and to some extent in Croatia. In the United States (California), it is one of the most widely planted grape varieties, having been introduced in the 1830s well before Primitivo. In France, it is registered in the official catalogue of vine varieties on the A1 list under the name Primitivo.
Maipo Valley is one of Chile's most important wine-producing regions. Located just South of the capital, Central-valley/maipo-valley/santiago">Santiago, Maipo Valley is home to some of the country's most prestigious wines. It is often described as the 'Bordeaux of South America', and Rich, fruit-driven Cabernet Sauvignon is undoubtedly its most celebrated wine style. Maipo is at the very Northern end of Chile's extensive Central Valley, running from just north of the Rapel Valley up to where the countryside begins to give way to houses and roads in the southern suburbs of Santiago.
I’d like to say we took advantage of the lockdown and its related commotion to do a stock-take, explore new avenues, turn over intriguing stones, widen and deepen our drinking, taking careful notes as we went. Sadly, no. I won’t say we got stuck in a rut, but we did tend to stick with comfort wines – and “comfort”, in our case, means familiar. Regular readers of this quarterly column can probably guess the labels on the resulting empties. We have a wider range of comfort foods, I’m afraid, than ...
A domaine’s long history hoists its inanimate wines into life; biography brings meaning to the simple sensual pleasure of tasting a grower’s efforts. It’s important, though, to know what we are doing when we tell stories. And to know what to tell them about. Winemakers take the messy chaos of natural processes and add discipline, giving shape and direction to produce a stable and enticing wine. This was never nature’s intent. The storyteller takes a messy chaos of random events, either imagined ...
St Hilaire is the patron saint of Mareuil-sur-Aÿ, the pretty Champagne village which is famous for scoring 99 on the Echelle des Crus. (This classification of Champagne vineyards was developed in the mid-20th century as a means of setting the price of grapes grown through the villages of the Champagne wine region.) Prime territory That the village missed out on grand cru status by one point is generally agreed to be an injustice – all the more so as it is home not only to the superlative Clos de ...