A day in the life of a winemaker

Marcelo Papa (51) is a winemaker and Concha y Toro’s technical director. Casillero del Diablo is the company’s most famous wine. Born in Santiago, he lives in Buin, Chile, with his wife, Gloria, and their son, Gianluca (17)

“It was just a natural thing to have wine on the table. So I became curious”

Iwake at 6.15am. Here in Chile, it can be very cold in the mornings. If the day is cloudy, it will be 15 degrees but if it is sunny, we will reach 20 degrees. It’s very beautiful.

I live in the heart of Buin, in Maipo. It is famous for its Cabernet Sauvignon. My house is 15 minutes away from the cellar where I work.

I take a quick breakfast — no more than 10 minutes. Normally, I have orange juice, pancakes and a couple of eggs. I have a son, a 17-year-old, who is in the last year of school. I drive him to school. Everything in my life revolves around my boy. That 10-minute drive is the one time of day that I have a chance to talk with him.

On my way to the cellar, I stop in the vineyards to check pruning. When we are close to harvesting season, I check maturity. Then, when I arrive at the cellar, the first thing I do is make an espresso. I have a very good espresso machine, and I buy very good coffee.

I am a winemaker. I am the technical director of Concha y Toro. The company makes a lot of wines, and Casillero del Diablo is probably its most popular.

The key factor to producing a nice wine for a certain price is the quality of the fruit. All of the rest of the process in the cellar is secondary. For that reason, it’s very important that my team and I visit the vineyards and see how the growers are getting on. How is the pruning coming on? What are we doing with the irrigation? Chile is a dry country, and we get drained in winter. So we need to irrigate the vine. In France and Italy, they don’t need to irrigate, because they get the water from the rain.

Chile is a long country, like a spaghetti — 4,000km from the north to the south. We have the mountains in one part, which separate Chile and Argentina. And then we have the Pacific Ocean in the west. That side has a pretty cold temperature. The water is cold there, and the wind is coming from the ocean into the land. So if we are thinking of producing Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc or Pinot Noir, normally we plant the vineyards close to the Pacific Ocean. Every single variety needs a specific climate and soil type.

Normally, I taste a lot of wines. I try to work in the vineyards in the mornings, and then I like to taste wine just before lunch because your senses are more sensitive. You are open to receive aromas and flavours. We also follow the evolution of the wine in the ageing process.

In the cellar, we receive visitors from all over the world, and we make presentations. We host tasting sessions with the wine from our bottled wines, and we explain the wine. I really love my job.

After lunch, I take another coffee, and then, in the afternoons, I go to my computer. I am at my desk doing paperwork.

When I was young, I was surrounded by wine. In my family, nobody produced wine. My four grandparents are Italian, arriving here between 1910 and 1940. My father and my mother were born here in Chile, but as a child, I was always looking at a bottle of wine on the table. It was often a very simple wine, and many times my father blended the wine with a kind of soda drink. It was just a natural thing to have wine on the table. And so, I became curious about it.

I had an uncle living in Miami, and we all went to visit him. He brought us wine-tasting, and I still remember the diversity of the wines there from France and Spain. They were amazing, and I became even more curious. I wasn’t a big drinker.

When I went to university, I studied agricultural engineering, and after that, I went on to study wine-making. It was an unusual choice, because everybody seemed to be studying fruit culture. At the time, there was a big crisis in Chile in wine, and we weren’t exporting a lot of wine. By the time I finished university, they started to export wines to other countries. I was lucky, because not many people had studied wine-making. Suddenly, I got the chance to be in this business at a time when there was a renaissance.

I worked in a Californian winery, which really opened my eyes. Back then, they were so advanced in technology, but the whole world has caught up now. I joined Concha y Toro in 1998.

I think good wine needs to be driven in a way so that people understand it is about making a moment more pleasant. If you match the wines with the food, that’s the best way. But if you drink a big glass of red Cabernet on its own, I don’t think you will be happy.

For aperitifs, people need to drink things with a lesser amount of alcohol. For that reason, there has been a big success with Prosecco.

When I have a Campari as an aperitif, first I put in lots of ice, a little bit of Campari, and then tonic water.

At the end of my working day, I take my bag and go home. When I arrive, I see my wife, Gloria, and our son. Normally when I arrive in, I take an ice-cold beer. Then we go into the kitchen. We have a very nice table, and we put on the TV. We like to watch a news programme where they have interviews about contemporary issues. We discuss that together. And then I have two or three bottles of wine open. I serve one glass. I don’t drink a lot, but I take my aperitif and then my food.

My wife cooks everything. She is fantastic. Then I go to bed. I watch a little bit of TV, and then I go to sleep.