Pais Salvaje

Best Buy. Based in Mingre, southwest of Talca and halfway to the sea, Bouchon farms 120-year-old Pais vines in the traditional method, allowing them to grow wild, as vines do, climbing up into the trees at the edge of the vineyard. They make this wine as it would have been made 120 years ago, destemming the bunches by forcing them through the woven sticks of a zaranda, working over a cement vat where the grapes ferment without additions, aging the wine in cement and bottling it unfiltered. It's a long way to travel from Mingre to Massachusetts, so it was surprising how much life this wine sustained, impervious to the distance from home, continuing to morph and grow with each taste, starting green, with a hint of tomato leaf, turning cool, toward raspberries and the tannins of their seeds, slipping into silky grace as delicious fruit completes the structure of a grand cru of Chile. Wine & Spirits October 2021

The aromatic, floral and delicate 2020 País Salvaje is pale and bright, with moderate alcohol and a superb palate with explosive flavors, all purity and nuance, quite harmonious and full of energy. It has moderate alcohol and great balance. Very tasty, super affordable and a great example of what the variety is capable of. Wine Advocate August 2021

Tim Atkin March 2021

The 2020 País Salvaje Bouchon is from Mingre, Maule, where the vines grow up the trunks of a native forest. Pressed directly with whole bunches and aged in concrete vats for six months, it has a nose of cherry and sweetbriar over a bed of herbs and earth. The coarse-grained tannins make for a rough and yet pleasantly rustic palate: the archetypal País mouthfeel. Vinous May 2021