Santa Cruz, Chile – in the Heart of Colchagua Valley

Total Miles Traveled: 11,975

Santa Cruz is located about 2 hours southwest of Santiago and about 45 minutes from the coast. It’s one of the key towns in Chile’s most known wine region – the Colchagua Valley. After getting to know Argentina’s wines and wine regions, we were excited to explore the wineries and wines in Chile. Although this region was close to the epicenter of Chile’s 8.8 devastating earthquake, we were told that roads and wineries were open.

It’s a very easy drive from Santiago and, while there are cheap buses that run multiple times a day to the area, Santa Cruz lacks local car rental agencies. So we rented a (toy!) car in Santiago and made the quick jaunt down.

A not quite so developed wine region

Santa Cruz is a small little village (though they have a casino that brings in weekend tourists from Santiago). The area boasts some of Chile’s oldest and best wineries, so we were surprised that there were only a handful of hotel options. Although it was a bit out of our budget, we stayed at Hotel Terravina which is a beautiful Spanish-style lodge located in the middle of a vineyard. Here’s the view from our room – not bad eh?

Aftermath of the earthquake

We imagine that Santa Cruz could be a very quaint and lovely village with it’s colonial and traditional Spanish style influence. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see this. When we arrived we quickly realized that this area suffered heavily from the earthquake. We heard reports that about 30-50% of the Santa Cruz area (as high as 80% in neighboring villages) suffered major damage.

But, even though we were there 6 weeks after the earthquake, a lot of cleanup had already been done and roads repaired. In fact, some of the damage to the roads were so severe (major cracks) that they destroyed the road and put down gravel instead.

Here are some images of the damage. This first one was ironic – it has a “For Sale” sign on it but most of the building behind the front facade is destroyed. Maybe they meant the property:

This was in downtown Santa Cruz:

Most of the homes that were destroyed were made of adobe brick and the curved roof tiles you see here didn’t fare so well in general.

Touring the Wineries

A few interesting tidbits:

Like Argentina, bodega visits typically include a tour with the tasting.
Unlike Argentina, tastings in Chile are quite expensive – even by U.S. standards. In one of the ‘better’ wineries, we were forced to pay $80 (YIKES!) for the tasting and tour (and it was the only time we’ve ever been given a wine to taste that had gone bad!).
On average, about >90% of wine is exported. Chile is home to only 17 million people and, historically, Chileans don’t drink that much wine (it’s just not part of the culture). Yet wine production significantly outpaces local consumption. Therefore, most all of the wine goes somewhere else (US and Europe mostly, but Asia is a growing market!). We expect this is why tastings are so expensive. It’s just not something Chileans do – it’s something almost elusively for foreign tourists (with $).

A River of Wine – Major Damage to the Wineries

We had planned to stay a few days to visit as many wineries as we could, but we quickly learned that most wineries were still closed due to damage from the earthquake. Less than 6 wineries were open (out of 25+ wineries). We went to all 6 🙂

Some wineries lost up to 80% of their wine. In total, 125 MILLION liters of wine were lost. That’s over 166 million bottles! If the average wine costs $10 a bottle, that means over $1.6 Billion of wine were lost!

Here’s Lisa in front of a couple of steel fermentation vats at the Montgras winery that had fallen in the earthquake. They were full of wine and bolted to the floor, causing the legs to twist and then topple during the earthquake.

Locals described a “river of red” when these vats fell at Montgras and in other wineries. In one area, the wine leaked into the water table (which in some areas is only 1-2 meters below ground) so that when local residents turned on their faucets, they got wine instead of water!

We heard stories about how the rich wine owners helped clean up the day after the earthquake and helped rebuild their employees’ houses. On many occasions, we asked if / how we could help. The answer was always the same – and (we thought) was interesting… “You can help by visiting .. buying the wine, eating at our restaurants and telling others to come… as for rebuilding, we are doing it ourselves.”

And now for some photos…

Here’s the vinoteca (wine library) at Montgras – amazingly, they only lost a handful of bottles during the earthquake. This room is below ground and the bottles are merely stacked on shelves. There was wine here that dated back to the mid 1990s, when they produced their first vintage. And it all survived!

Here is Montes winery (pictured earlier) but from the inside. The roof is made of concrete and until the earthquake happened, the grape sorting was done up there. Well, rumor has it the roof was heavily damaged even though the building was built only 5 years ago. They had spent a month repairing it and still weren’t confident enough in it to resume sorting operations above…

Here’s the wine storage room at Montes, built like an amphitheater. The somewhat gimmicky thing is that they play Gregorian chant music in here – think singing to a baby in the womb. The tour guide explained that the sound waves help settle the sediment.