Invasion of the Vintners.(influence of French winemakers in Chile)(Brief Article)(Industry Overview)

When French winemaker Alexandra Marnier-Lapostolle began buying up vineyards in Chile's Rapel Valley in the mid-1990s, the vines were bursting with grapes. So she took a pair of pruners and walked up and down the rows, methodically lopping off and discarding the crimson bunches. "The Chilean workers were aghast," says Marnier-Lapostolle, a fourth-generation descendant of the Grand Marnier family. "They couldn't understand why we'd be wasteful and throw away grapes." But it was the first of many lessons they got in making a better bottle of wine: too much fruit on the vine dilutes the flavors. Marnier- Lapostolle drastically reduced each vine's yield, from nearly 60 bunches of grapes to about eight.

It paid off. Six years and $20 million later, Casa Lapostolle is turning out some of South America's--and the world's--best wines. The powerful but elegant Clos Apalta, for instance, now goes for $50 a bottle, and is coveted by oenophiles the world over. Exports from the 750-acre winery have jumped from 60,000 cases in 1996 to 150,000 cases last year. "I can now say that we are thrilled with the quality of this wine," says Marnier-Lapostolle. "We have made a wine that is Chilean by nature but French by design," she adds, quoting the slogan that appears on every bottle.

Chilean wines have reached the top shelf. The country is already renowned for its cheaper offerings, known as plonk; for the first time this year, a dry wine by Chile's Concha y Toro beat out Italy's syrupy Riunite as the top U.S. wine import. But now Chile, and to a lesser extent, Argentina, is starting to turn out wines of much higher quality--and price. Known as the super-Chileans, these wines are made mostly in conjunction with star vintners from California and France, who have been taking over prime grape-growing land. Baron Philippe de Rothchild's name, for instance, appears on an ultra-premium bottle of Concha y Toro's Almaviva, which goes for $85, and California's Robert Mondavi vineyard has teamed up with a local Chilean family to produce CaliTerra. "We kept looking around the world's wine-growing regions to see where we'd set up shop, and Chile kept appearing on our radar screen," says Robert Mondavi's son Tim, who is running CaliTerra. "What you see happening in Chile now, in terms of quality and price, is what was happening in northern California a decade or two ago."

Foreign winemakers had been eying Chile for years. The Spaniards first planted grapevines there in the 16th century, and the region's dry climate, abundant sunshine and cool ocean breezes helped them flourish. Soil and labor were cheap, and wine-makers didn't have to pay costly taxes or abide by national appellation regulations, as they do in the Bordeaux region of France or Chianti in Italy. But as long as Gen. Augusto Pinochet was in power, foreign winemakers were shut out. So when the dictator was ousted in 1988, vintners started to make their move into Chile. By the mid-1990s, dozens of ...