A New Taste of Chile

Just to show you how seriously we take matching our wines to the evening's dinner, I made sure that the picture shows just how magically the wine label matches the colour of the roses and even the tomato and cream based sauce. Now, that's some kind of matching!

Actually, I didn't really know this wine but I'd originally picked it up because I liked the thought of trying a Chilean Syrah. The hope for tonight was that it might exhibit some Old World restraint with a good dose of New World fruit and that, therefore, it'd go well with the spice of the dish and cut through the cream and acidity of the sauce.

1179. 2008 Antu Ninquén Syrah (Colchagua Valley D.O. - Chile)

The BC market doesn't see a lot of Syrah coming in from Chile but I did try some very nice, high end ones at this Spring's Vancouver Playhouse Wine Festival. Antu is part of the Montgras group and, as such, was one of the participating wineries this year. They served the 2010 vintage of their Syrah but I'd already spotted and picked up this bottle on the shelves prior to the big show.

The winery's website states that "Ninquén" means "plateau on a mountain" in one of the native dialects and that this is, indeed, the first mountain vineyard in Chile. The website showed a neat picture of the vineyard - it appeared to be set in almost a crater like setting - but I wasn't able to download it to use on the blog.

Although, I've read that the Ninquén project was started in 1997 to give Montgras an opening into the higher end of wines in Chile, it still clocks in at around $25. For that price though, I might be more resigned to stick with some tried and true Aussie Shiraz. I can't, however, deny that the label certainly matched the roses nicely.