Day Two, Chile, July 2000 Pictured here are, from left to right, Soledad Achurra - who just mastered a two-wheel bike yesterday; her dad, Santiago, Jr - co-owner with his father of Fundo Requingua; my daughter, Maia, who is spending the summer in Chile doing research for a Chilean human rights organization; her friend Gabriel; and Ricardo Hevia, plant manager. But enough of real people….let’s talk about something interesting, like 24,000 liter stainless steel shipping containers. Most of the gringos who came to Chile in the mid-1990s purchased bulk wine and headed back home as soon as California wine plantings caught up with demand. A few of us though had realized the potential of Chilean and Argentine wines and stayed on, despite the petty annoyance and genuine difficulties of making wine thousands of miles from home. Unlike the less-committed Americans, we don’t “source” Chilean wine: we grow it and make it here. Five months later, it’s pumped into insulated tanks like those shown above, trucked to the port of Valparaiso (or over the Andes, in the case of our Mendoza wine), loaded into a container ship below the waterline, shipped up the Pacific coast, off-loaded in Oakland three weeks later, driven to our winery, and pumped out to barrels, where it ages for a year before being bottled. From South America to our winery, the wine never leaves the container. How do we know that the wine we made is the wine shipped? The wine is sealed with a customs tag that is broken only at our winery, and is tested against samples when it arrives. And why not just age and bottle Terra Rosa in South America? Because it’s a lot more economical to ship it up in bulk than bottled. Besides, our barrel program in California is already set up to accommodate a program as complex as Terra Rosa and the extensive blending involved. Tomorrow, more about rocks and stream beds.     Do you have any questions, comments or suggestions? Email: jwdineline@aol.com Copyright © 1998 Inter Active Media Solutions. All Rights Reserved. The interactive components of this site require that you use a current browser version of Explorer; be sure to maximize your window out so you can see the entire page. This page was created by Inter Active Media Solutions.