Home-grown grape.(Radar)(Brief Article)

A French wine expert wandering through a vineyard near Santiago spotted out-of-place reddish leaves among merlot grapes. Tests confirmed the grape was not a merlot but a carmenere, which had disappeared from France during a phylloxera plant lice outbreak in the 1880s. The lost grape, found in 1994, had been thriving for generations in Chilean vineyards, misidentified as merlot. Now Chilean wine makers, the grape's only commercial producers, want carmenere to be Chile's trademark wine.

"This is a spicy, smooth wine with soft tannins. The aroma of black pepper is typical," says Carolina Rivera, a spokeswoman for Vina Tarapaca, which exports carmenere. "It has great potential."

In 1998, there were fewer than 1,200 hectares producing carmenere; in 2003, that number had swelled fivefold. A local university is testing new growing techniques to improve quality. Chilean winemakers like Concha y Toro are marketing the new wine abroad. By 2000, California's Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates, through holdings in Chile, began promoting its first major carmenere bottling for export under the Calina label.

Timing couldn't be better. Earlier in 2004, Chile grabbed the attention of the wine world when the highly regarded Wine Spectator magazine gave a coveted 95 rating (out of 100 possible) to two Chilean wines blended with the carmenere grape: 2001 Clos Apalta from Casa Lapostolle and 2001 Almaviva, a joint venture of Vina Concha y Toro and France's Baron Phillipe de Rothschild. The ratings were Chile's highest ever.

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