A Day in the Casablanca Wine Valley in Chile

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26 March 2014 – Wednesday – Day Trip to Casablanca Wine Valley, Chile

Today we went on a self-guided wine tour of the Casablanca Valley. We had done some research and collected a few brochures about organized tours, but they seemed ridiculously expensive for what they were offering and we decided we could do it ourselves much cheaper and visit more wineries and taste more wine. We took the metro from Santa Lucia to the bus station at Alameda only to find out that the local buses to the town of Casablanca departed not from there but from another bus station, called San Borja. The buses from Alameda pass by Casablanca and can drop you off on the highway. (As the day turned out, this would have been a better option as there is no reason to go into Casablanca town itself and five of the wineries are located directly off the highway, Route 68.) The San Borja bus station is only a ten minute walk from the Alameda bus station and we hopped on the next bus to Casablanca. It is about 70 kilometers from Santiago and took about 90 minutes as it stopped on the way to collect and disembark passengers. It cost 2000 Chilean Pesos each (about 4 US Dollars). We disembarked at the terminus in Casablanca. I had an idea to rent bicycles there, but we could not locate the bike rental shop (which turned out to be a good thing!). Instead, we took a taxi to the first winery, Indomito, where we had a very good lunch overlooking their vineyards and the valley below. We did not bother with a tour. Joan has taken a wine course and we have been on a couple of winery tours in Europe. We saw the vines coming in and the large room filled with enormous steel vats and the oak barrels in the cellar you can see through large glass windows. We overheard part of one tour and it was sounded very basic and a bit dull. We had a glass each of the local sparkling wine to start with our complimentary appetiser, shared two different glasses of their red wine with our main courses of beef, one with rosemary potatoes and the other with gnocchi, and then finished with a couple glasses of desert wine to accompany the shared chunky and very rich brownie with ice cream dessert. All the wines were from the local vineyard and were quite acceptable. Joan says the Chilean Sauvignon Blanc is very good, perhaps not quite as sophisticated as the New Zealand wines she loves, and that all the Chilean wines we have sampled are good every-day drinking wines (and we are doing our best to drink them every day!).

The second winery, Vina Mar, we could see from the terrace of Indomito. We walked through the vines where Joan ate a few of the burgeoning grapes. We had to climb around a barricade to get into the vineyards of Vina Mar and passed a sign of a man holding a gun with a cross through it which we interrupted to mean ‘no hunting’ rather than ‘we shoot trespassers’. We woke the security guard as we approached from the wrong direction, but he just gave us a smile and a wave and jovially pointed us in the direction of the winery. We partook in a proper wine-tasting here that consisted of good-sized portions of a sparkling wine, a white and two reds. We drank it all and did not waste a drop!

The sun was now high and hot in the sky and we decided we needed to visit a third winery, Emiliania, which is an organic winery. The map seemed to indicate that it was just across the highway. We had to backtrack a bit to cross over the highway by a pedestrian bridge and we proceeded down a featureless road adjacent the highway toward the winery. There were three wineries shown on the map, in addition to a well-reviewed restaurant run by a South African, but after about 30 minutes’ walking we had yet to come across the first one. The hot sun beat down on our wine-addled brains and we bickered a little about always doing things ‘the hard way’, we should have taken a taxi, why did we need to do three wineries ... etc. After another fifteen minutes trudging alongside the busy highway, we passed the first winery, Quintay and then the Botha restaurant and the second winery, called House, and about ten minutes later arrived at Emiliana. It was 5:30 and the winery closed at 6pm. The long dirt road up to it was like walking up a garden path with beautiful and colourful plants along the entire distance and the vineyards behind and we immediately forgot our annoyance and enjoyed the bountiful beauty of nature. We reached the tasting room at 5:45 where the manager told us that he wouldn’t be able to offer us a tour or a full tasting but that he offered us a glass of wine on the house for our trouble! This winery was the most beautiful of the three. There were birds that looked like partridges with chicks in the grass around the main building. There were a couple of small ponds and a small group of llamas. The winery offer bicycle tours through their vineyards that would have been a wonderful experience had we known about it before or arrived earlier. This winery recently won the ‘Green Winery of the Year’ award. We were very glad to have had the opportunity to visit it, if only for less than half an hour.

What we should have done is this: taken the Tur Bus from Alameda station and disembarked at the toll booth after the long tunnel and which is a very short walk to the Emiliana winery. From there, the other two wineries and the South African-run restaurant (the House winery also offer a restaurant that a young couple we met at Emiliana said was very good) are all within a 30 minute walk. (Perhaps the good folk at Emiliana would loan you their bicycles, if they weren’t too busy and you bought a few bottles of wine first!) If, after lunch and three winery visits and tastings, you still had the urge to try more wines, then a taxi to Indomito and/or Vina Mar is recommended. When you are well and truly wined-out, you can wave down a Tur Bus heading back into Santiago as there is a bus stop very near Vina Mar and if the bus is not full it will stop for you (another 2000 Pesos). This is what we should have done – and what we will do next time!

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Comments

[Sarah R]

Really helpful info thank you
Was trying to work out if we could bus to Casablanca from Valpo and then bike: your suggestion to base a tour round Emiliana is perfect. Thank You!