Carignan, Grenache, Mataró
Dry
Residual Sugar: 1.1 g/l
Medium Bodied
750ml
14% alc./vol

Garage Wine Co Cariñena Field-Blend Sauzal Vineyard Lot 95 2018

Valle del Maule, Chile

96 points (2018) - Robert Parker

$51.95per bottle ($311.70per case)
6 bottles per case

Wild & Subtle

This product will be available online as part of the Vintages Special Offers program. Please feel free to contact us at info@npwines.com if you need any assistance locating stock.

Garage Wine Co was literally started in a garage in 2001, by Etobicoke expat Derek Mossman and his wife Pilar Miranda. Since then, the dynamic duo have chosen to revive old vineyards in marginalized Chilean communities. They work mostly in the regions of Maule and Itata where they make highly coveted wines.

This wine is a single parcel field blend made from Carignan, Garnacha and Mataro, belonging to Don Nivaldo Morales and his wife Otelia and located in Sauzal, on the Coastal Range, where the soils are way older and more complex than the Andes. As Derek says, it is a tribute to the resilience of the ploughmen farmers of the Maule who have been stewards of the vines since colonial times.

The nose is fresh and has tantalizing aromas of blueberries, violets, orange peel, raspberry leaf and aniseed with a touch of aromatic herbs that provide freshness. The palate is electric, with citric acidity, ultra-fine tannins and very good length. This is both rustic and elegant, wild and subtle. None of these wines show any alcohol or wood. This is a superb, fresh, Mediterranean blend that shows what the Maule is capable of.

Wines made from Cariñena are ideal with richer poultry dishes such as turkey or duck, roasted pork, or even a meaty beef brisket.

About the Winery

Garage Wine Co.

Garage Wine was literally started in a garage in 2001, by Etobicoke expat Derek Mossman and his wife Pilar Miranda. Since then, the dynamic duo handcraft wines from a series of individual vineyards located in the Maule and Itata Valleys, in the south of Santiago, Chile.

Garage Wine Co makes wines from a series of individual parcels, small lots / bottlings of 8-22 barrels that include a series of dry-farmed field-blends of Carignan, Garnacha, Monastrell, País, Cinsault and Cab Franc grown on pre-phylloxera rootstock with small farmers in the Maule and Itata. Each wine is from a 1-2 hectare parcel in a different place.

Over the years working in the community they have raised a veritable posse of vineyard hands whose skills are working the vineyards the old way / the traditional way– originario. The vineyards are on the old coastal range of mountains closer to the Pacific and have granitic soils with cracks for roots to get deep down into.

When GWCo. speaks of the provenance of these wines they mean more than just the geological terroir. Derek and Pilar think the farming practices that have evolved over generations have as much to do with the wines’ personalities as the soils. All the wines are made by hand with native yeasts in small tanks, punched down manually and pressed out in a small basket press. GWCo is still very much a DIY operation and we still tow much of the crop back to the winery in trailers behind trusty pickup trucks 2,000 kilos at a time.

Press Reviews

Robert Parker

96 points

The Sauzal Vineyard is now in the DO Empedrado, and I tasted two of the vintages, starting with the 2018 Sauzal Vineyard, a field blend of Cariñena, Garnacha and Monastrell from grower Nivaldo Morales, which Garage's Derek Mossman described as "a universe of perfume, earth and spice." About the blend, the old bush vines that have been worked by horse and following the moon cycles in ancestral ways, he also explained that "over the last 10 harvests in Sauzal, the wine has changed its varietal composition. First it was all Cariñena, then we grafted Garnacha and Monastrell and then a few years later more Garnacha until in the 2018 vintage the wine is composed of equal parts Garnacha and Cariñena with 6% Monastrell." It has a lively, medium-bodied palate with grainy tannins (think granite!) and bright acidity. There's no lack of ripeness, aromas or flavors, but the wine is very balanced. 4,087 bottles were filled in January 2020.