P Parra y Familia, Pencopolitano

THIS IS THE new Chile: vibrant, balanced, poised. The old Chile, being a little unsure of itself, strove for authority via over-oaking and over-extraction. The new Chile doesn’t need any of that. It’s not afraid to take risks, and it seeks acidity in the way that the old Chile sought softness. It is so secure and confident, it feels as though it doesn’t have to try.

Enough poetry. The first thing (person, actually) to talk about is Pedro Parra. He’s a terroir consultant (not a career likely to feature in a school careers office) with clients from Sonoma to Burgundy, and he’s obsessed with finding the very best terroirs for wine. ‘A lot of my job is making people change their mind,’ he has said. He has joined forces with Louis-michel Liger-Belair in a Chilean project called Aristos, but this is his very own project, the grapes sourced from a handful of different vineyards of ungrafted vines of up to 100 years old, some of them field blends, right down in the cool south of the country.

marginal climates are something Parra likes very

much. What he also likes is the red granite soils here, which he says give a nervous tension to the wine and lots of upfront flavour on the palate. There is also some schist in these vineyards: schist, he says, brings a more horizontal structure and powerful tannins.

The winemaking uses indigenous yeasts, and there’s great purity to the wine, along with vivid black fruit, a stony, mineral character, floral, red-berried notes, medium body and immense moreishness. The tasting sample I have at my elbow while writing this has been followed by a second tasting sample. It’s an exhilarating wine.