3 C's and a discovery: Chile's red wine story

The Post and Courier Pee Dee reports that Dennis Fraley explores Chilean wine in this edition of The Bottle Talk.

Dennis Fraley explores Chilean wine in this edition of The Bottle Talk.

For most of the twentieth century, it was quietly growing one of Bordeaux's most noble grape varieties and calling it Merlot.

Not out of deception, but out of honest ignorance.

The grape had arrived in the mid-1800s, thrived in Chile's phylloxera-free soils and settled so comfortably into the landscape that nobody thought to question what it actually was.

Then on November 24, 1994, a French ampelographer named Jean-Michel Boursiquot was walking through a Merlot vineyard at Viña Carmen in the Maipo Valley and noticed something odd.