Chile is a country of limitless vinous potential. No phylloxera, extreme Andean geologies, ocean, mountain and sun. But who is making wines of terroir? Please allow us to introduce Louis-Antoine Luyt.
Chile is a country of limitless vinous potential. No phylloxera, extreme Andean geologies, ocean, mountain and sun. But who is making wines of terroir? Please allow us to introduce Louis-Antoine Luyt.
Luyt, a Burgundy born dreamer, left France at 22 to “practice his Spanish” in Chile. He worked in restaurants, ultimately becoming a sommelier, and was struck by the observation that despite Chile’s awesome potential, it mostly produced homogenous wines. So Luyt returned to France to study viticulture and oenology and take a job working under Lapierre in Morgon. Finally, he returned to Chile with a fresh vision of how to highlight the unique terroir of the ancient parcels he had discovered.
Luyt fights to redefine Chilean wines on two fronts. First, he makes the “Pipeño Pais” line of single vineyard wines from prephylloxera Pais grapes. Pais (known as the Mission grape in California) was the first grape in the New World, brought by the monks who traveled to the Americas with the Spanish Conquistadors. It has been eclipsed by the international varieties, but Luyt shows that Pais is actually amazingly terroir transparent, showing the nuanced differences between plots.
But Luyt also fights to show what better-known varieties can do in this terroir. He has old clones and plantings of Pinot Noir, Carignan, Carmenere—a great starting point. He works with minimal interventions, ferments with native yeast and makes, ultimately, the most exciting wines We've seen yet from Chile, and at prices that are remarkably reasonable.
