If you’ve been reading the glossy travel magazines lately, you’ve probably seen them gushing about a new hotel in Chile called Singular Patagonia. It’s the kind of place the art directors at these magazines drool over: a repurposed old factory in a stunning setting, with a great chef at the helm.

Just one problem: most of these editors and art directors are in New York City and they have never set foot in the place. Neither have any of their writers. So they’re basically revamping the press release and passing it off as a recommendation.

Here at Luxury Latin America, we don’t work like that. We’ve got a man on the scene who can swoop in and see if the hype is justified. Our man in Chile is Jimmy Langman, who is also editor of the Patagon Journal. He has written guidebooks and done articles for Newsweek, plus he lives in Chile. So he knows what he’s talking about.

Here’s what he had to say about this strange and beautiful hotel:

The Singular is built on and around a 1915 cold storage plant for processing and exporting frozen meat and wool. After more than 70 years, the Frigorifo Puerto Bories plant closed down and in 1996 was declared a national monument. As Nicolas Sahli, the executive director and owner of The Singular tells it, this plant played an integral part in boosting the sheep farming industry in the region that his own great-grandfather several generations ago, Jose Menendez, helped establish. This industry now informs the cultural identity of Patagonia almost as much as the towering peaks in Torres del Paine.

The public rooms are in the historic sections, including the old slaughterhouse, but the rooms are in a new wing built just for the hotel. So hopefully you won’t be haunted by any ghost sheep.

See our full review here of Singular Patagonia in Chile.

Last week I had the pleasure of participating in a virtual wine tasting set up by Wines of Chile to sample eight different white wines from Chile’s coastal regions. Most of Chile is a coastal region, of course, with no point in that skinny country too far from the ocean.

The result is a geography well-suited for growing wine grapes. You get warm and sunny days, cool nights, and the Humbolt Current moderating the weather. With an ocean on one side and the Andes Mountains on the other, there are not a lot of pest and disease worries. Still, the various valleys–these wines came from four different ones—each have their own terroir and microclimate.

We sampled three Chardonnays and five Sauvignon Blancs with seafood we’d each prepared, then I threw in some other typical flavor profiles (cheese, olives, bread, salad) to see how they fared with those. As expected, the Sauvignon Blanc wines paired much better with food—any food—so I’ll cover them first. The big overall takeaway from me and the others I was connected to by chat stream was that these wines are a terrific value. That’s not news to anyone who reaches for bottles from Chile in the supermarket, but many of these were the top-line option from the vineyard, yet carried a retail list price between $13 and $19. Only one topped $20.

For me, the $25 Casa Silva Cool Coast wine was in the middle of the pack. Casa Silva is known more for its bold reds, but this Sauvignon Black shows lots of richness, with more pineapple overtones than most, along with the citrus and a touch of pepper. Like most of the others we tried, there’s a nice bracing minerality to this, a contrast from many cheap versions that seem like the grapes were grown in sand and Miracle-gro.

Two tasted like they came straight out of New Zealand instead of Chile: the globalization of wine flavor profiles spreads rapidly these days. Los Vascos from the Casablanca Valley is owned by Barons de Rothschild, so it only makes sense they’d be taking a little of this, a little of that from around the world. This is a bright, aggressive wine with grassy, green pepper tastes, citrus, and a little melon on the nose. It has a spicy kick at the end. A bit overpowering with the wrong food, but a great sipper on its own. It also holds up well for days in the fridge, even without a vacuum top.  Next time you’re reaching for a New Zealand S.B that’s $25, get this instead for $14.

Vina Casablanca’s Nimbus wine has many of the same in-your-face pepper and straw flavors, but it’s a little more delicate and herbal. It’s surprisingly balanced and elegant for a $12 bottle of wine. Despite the price, it uses hand-picked grapes that ferment for three weeks and go through a one-month battonage process. The minerals in this one help it pair well with flavorful seafood and hard cheese, plus I imagine it would go very well with apples.

I liked the Veramonte Ritual wine from the Casablanca Valley a lot. It has the typical straw and green pepper tastes, but it’s silkier than most, with juicy fruit flavors and a higher acidity in the mix. This is pitched as a “Russian River style” Sauvignon Blanc and comes across as more tropical. It has a touch of oak, but from the third use of the barrel, so it’s subtle. 

My favorite overall was Cono Sur, from the Visión winery. This ranks as one of the best $15 white wines I can remember having anywhere. It’s a softer, gentler version of the style, less bracing, more juicy. Flavors of peach and melon come through and floral overtones make for a great nose. It held up to grilled fish, soft cheese, and good bread well without overpowering any of them, but not getting lost either. It’s the kind of mouth-watering wine that disappears before you know it as glasses get refilled. As a bonus, it’s organic, plus the company offsets all its carbon emissions. If you’ve avoided organic wine because you assumed it had to be lousy, try this one and change your mind.

I couldn’t help but notice that three of these came from the Casablanca Valley. Lucky for you, should you ever visit Chile, because that’s just a short drive toward the coast from Santiago, close to Valparaiso. See our story on touring the wine districts near Santiago for more.

I’d be proud to serve any of these five to guests coming over for a party or dinner. With flavorful seafood, salads, and ceviche, you’ll probably go through the bottles quickly. Buy extra!

We’ve just posted a review of Quincho Country Home, an intimate, high-service inn just outside of Puerto Varas, Chile. If you’re planning to spend some time in this lake district of Patagonia, we’d recommend this one over our only other featured hotel there, Hotel Patagonico.

Our reviewer just stayed in both and found that Patagonico has declined a bit since Melia management pulled out and there were lapses in maintenance and service. We see this time and again in areas where tour groups seldom stay for more than a night and the front desk checks people in by the busload.

For a more personal and attentive experience, Quincho Country Home will set you up right. You’ll talk with the chef who is going to prepare your meal, with the guide who will lead your excursion, and with the manager who will see what special requests you may have for your room. And they’ll all communicate with each other, not in silos. If you’re a foodie, this is your spot:

If you have a passion for cooking, you will be interested in knowing that you are welcome in the kitchen at any time. If you want, you are invited to go along with the chef as he does his shopping at the markets in the morning, and you can the work alongside him as much or as little as you like preparing the food. As many ingredients as possible are sourced locally, including free range eggs, veggies from the on-site garden, and fish from the local fisherman. Only the top Chilean wines are served.

Sure, this place is a little further out, but you have eight acres for roaming. They’ll pick you up from Puerto Montt airport and see to it that your wishes are granted in terms of activities and sightseeing while you’re there. See our detailed review of Quincho Country Home.

I recently did a post on a pairing of Carmenere wine with curry, a seemingly odd combination that worked much better than expected. I highlighted which of the eight bottles went over the best from a collection of what Chile is trying to make a household name in wine.

I didn’t truly understand how new this varietal was though until I read this history of it on The Terroirist blog (love that name). The grape was thought to be wiped out when it disappeared from disease in France and Chile was labeling it Merlot until 1998. So basically this wine has only existed in its correctly diagnosed form for 13 years.

On The Day, this writer notes that a red wine can taste pretty ho-hum and have a smell that’s not exactly enticing—until you pair it with the right food. Then a magical transformation occurs, which is what happened with many of these Chilean wines.

I was happy to see somebody picking the same favorite out of the eight bottles as my party did. That was the group eating and drinking with blogger Mellissa at A Fit & Spicy Life. Since I didn’t have the foresight to photograph all the bottles before diving in with a corkscrew, that’s her photo at the top.

You can see more reviews of the Carmenere wines I tasted at The Good Wine Guru and the wine column at the Augusta Chronicle.

Nothing I’m reading from others makes me think this wine is going to suddenly become staggeringly popular and take off the way Argentina’s Malbec has, but Wines of Chile did convince a batch of us writers that Carmenere pairs well with spicy food. Remember that next time you’re ordering cuisine with a kick.

Get Chilean wine at the source: see our section on Luxury Travel in Chile.

I got to sample a good bit of Carmenere wine when I went on a tour of Chile’s wine districts a while back. There wasn’t much side-by-side tasting from different wineries then though, so I was excited when Wines of Chile offered to send a sampling kit of different Carmenere wines (technically Carménère with the accents) to run through in a tasting. They also sent some spices from the Ger-Nis Culinary and Herb Center in New York to put together a meal of Indian food, the point being that these wines have the heft and spice to stand up to food that’s hitting all the taste buds.

I can’t bear to see wine go to waste, so I invited a relative to help me taste two of these in a preliminary round and then had some friends over for oven-baked tandori chicken with chutney, vegetarian curry, and raita later for the others.

Chile’s great hope is to make Carmenere as popular and well-known as Malbec from Argentina or Shiraz from Australia. Or at least Zinfandel from California. There are some obstacles there: this wine can be inconsistent and doesn’t have much of a nose, so it has traditionally been used more as a blending grape, including back when it was a Bordeaux grape in France historically. Still, it’s got a lot more heft than some wimpier wines like Merlot if it’s done right and this sampling proved the point.

The best thing it has going for it is value. The eight wines in my sampling ranged from a list price of $13 to $24. Chances are you’ll find them for even less in your local shop or online at a place like Wine.com. This is despite the fact that many of these are made from hand-picked grapes that are then sorted by hand and they are aged for months in real barrels—no cheating with wood chips tossed in a giant vat.

Of the eight, three emerged as crowd favorites and they were in the middle of the pack price-wise. Carmen Gran Reserva Carmenere 2009 from the Apalta Valley was deemed the “most European” of the bunch. It is dry, with deep tannins, and felt very structured. Aged in French Oak barrels for 10 months, it has a long finish and went well with a variety of food.

Santa Carolina Reserva de Familia Carmenere 2009 from the Rapel Valley was also a hit. This is an earthy wine aged 15 months in barrels and has a lot of heft, with tastes of herbs, cherries, and blackberries complimented with lots of spiciness. It went very well with the curry dish.

Casa Silva Los Lingues Gran Reserva Carmenere 2008 is a very silky and elegant wine, with hints of dark chocolate and plenty of fruit. For us it was the one that seemed to evolve the most after breathing a while. In the end it was a bit sweeter than the others.

One not rising to the top but getting comments of “that is really good for organic wine” was the Natura Carmenere 2010 from Emiliana winery in the Colchagua Valley. I got to sample a whole range of their output on my Chile visit and can attest that the whole line is surprisingly good, really great in some cases. They’ll change your whole outlook on how much organic wine has progressed in the past five or six years.

None of the other four wines we tried out was a clunker and taste is a very personal thing, so consider all these to be worth checking out as well—they were hand-picked by people who are in the know. We also tried Carmenere from Santa Rita, Montes Alpha (the $24 one), household name Concha y Toro, and Haras de Pirque. The last one is not a pure Carmenere as it has some Cabernet Savignon in the mix. Because of this, it was the only one with much of a smell when sticking my nose into the glass, so I think the traditional Chilean blends still have an advantage when it comes to wine you would sip on their own without food.

Next time you’re cooking up some curry, however, give a bottle of carmenere a try. You might be surprised by how well they go together!

Some other bloggers, some with more wine experience than me, are doing a live webinar with a Chilean vintner tonight, which I couldn’t attend because I’m adventuring in Chiapas, Mexico. But I’ll report back later with some links to what they discovered.