la viña Concha y Toro

I have uploaded photos onto the blog! Feel free to peruse older entries to see photos. I have taken hundreds of photos since I got here and had to be extremely choosy in which ones made it to the blog. In most cases the images don't do the places justice, especially in Torres del Paine. You really just have to be there to appreciate it for all it is worth.

Today some friends I've made through the program and I went to a vineyard. It is not far from Santiago, and you can ride the Metro most of the way there. By the time I leave Chile I think I will have a very good idea of how the alcoholic beverage industry operates here as I have now visited two breweries and one vineyard. Concha y Toro is Chile's biggest and most famous vineyard, and their wines are readily avaliable in the USA. The tour included a wine tasting and a free souvenir wine glass. We also were allowed to pick a few cabernet sauvignon grapes off of the vine and eat them. They were very small and extremely sugary. We also visited the wine cellars, where the wine is aged in oak barrels. Afterwards I paid a visit to the wine shop. Sending a case of wine to the USA costs $170, plus the cost of the wine, so I think it's safe to say no one will be receiving a present in the mail anytime soon. I did buy two bottles for myself to keep here in Chile. The total cost of that was about $12.

For those of you who are interested in wine, Chile produces some excellent vintages. Red wine is by far the most popular here, but there are some decent white wines as well. I learned today that Chile is the only country which has never really suffered from the molds and other plagues which can affect the grape vines. Some kinds of grapes were wiped out in Europe due to plagues in the 1800s, and if the exact same varieties had not already been planted in Chile, certain types of wine would not exist today.

Chile benefits (or suffers from, depending on the topic of discussion) extreme geographical isolation. The country is isolated from neighbouring lands by the super-tall Andes to the east, the Atacama desert (the world's driest) to the north, the frozen ice fields to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. These natural barriers have protected Chile's grapes from disease. ¡Salud!