The beach at Infinity Bay, Honduras

A couple times a year I like to highlight which pages of Luxury Latin America travelers are clicking on the most. It changes a lot from one quarter to the next depending on where our readers are headed and who’s in the news (good or bad), and usually it’s a bit surprising who makes it up to the top.

The most popular pages are the portal ones, like the main luxury tours page or luxury travel in Costa Rica, but here are the individual ones people planning a vacation landed on the most so far this year.

Luxury hotel and resort reviews:

5) Infinity Bay in Roatan, Honduras
4) Cayo Espanto near Ambergris Caye, Belize
3) Jicaro Island Ecolodge near Granada, Nicaragua
2) Azul in Ambergris Caye, Belize
1) Hotel Garzon in Uruguay

Mendoza wine country, Argentina

Luxury tours in Latin America:

5) Getting Pampered in the Spas of Argentina
4) Touring the Wine Districts of Chile Near Santiago
3) Touring the Best of Mendoza Wine Country, Argentina
2) Trekking From Lodge to Lodge to Machu Picchu, Peru
1) The Coffee Triangle of Colombia

So from all this I’ll conclude you want to head to a beach, get pampered, or drink some wine. Except for that hardy bunch going trekking through the Andes Mountains…

A few years back when I researched this wine tours near Santiago story, I had the pleasure of visiting Undurraga winery in the Maipo Valley of Chile. We tasted great wine, we blended some ourselves, and topped it off with some excellent pairings at lunch.

Wines of Chile, the organization responsible for promoting Chilean wine, had its big annual gala last weekend and in the awards they dubbed Viña Undurraga “Winery of the Year.”

Wines of Chile commended Undurraga for “its labor in the development of viti-viniculture, its role in the market of sparkling wine in Chile and its achievements in rejuvenating the category through the ‘Sparkling People’ campaign.”

I doubt we’ll suddenly see a flood of Chilean sparkling wine on our shelves in North America because of this award, but if you want to sample this vineyard’s excellent still wines, look for the labels Aliwen, Altazor, or Founder’s Collection. See more about Undurraga at their website. (In English and Spanish.)

Thinking of visiting the country? See our luxury travel in Chile section to see reviews of the best hotels and interesting upscale tours.

Recently when I was traveling in Europe, two wine lovers said to me, in rather hushed tones so nobody would overhear, that they thought wine from Chile was “an amazing value.” Word has definitely gotten out, even on a continent that’s already flooded with wine.

Last month I did a post on 5 excellent Sauvignon Blanc wines from Chile that I had the opportunity to try side-by-side in a tasting. Today here’s a rundown on three excellent Chardonnay choices that I also sampled. (I know, tough job.)

I started with the others because they’re much easier to pair with food. Even people who love Chardonnay will switch to something else when dinner is served. I was eating grilled fish, robust cheese, bread, and olives with the various wines and only the olives really stood up to Chardonnay’s overpowering flavors. (The best match was actually bread dipped in yummy Olave organic olive oil with a generous mix of herbs.)

Having said that, two of these performed better than the usual suspects from California or Australia. The sub-$20 ones from either of those places tend to taste like a woody mess made in a factory rather than something that came from ripe fruit with character. In Chile, a Chardonnay retailing for $16-$18 like these tends to be one from a first pressing from hand-picked grapes,aged in new oak barrels.

My favorite of the bunch was the 2010 Santa Rita Medalla Real. Although this wine spends eight months in oak barrels, the wood was not nearly as aggressive as it usually is in many typical Chardonnays and both the minerals and acidity were well-balanced. It seemed to get rounder and fuller as it warmed up, hinting at nutty flavors that didn’t come through when it was colder. With a nice nose and long finish, this is a great all-around sipping wine.

The 2009 Marques Casa Concha, from Chile’s biggest wine producer, was much better than I had expected. With a full year in French Oak barrels the wood overtones were more prominent, but this reminded me of the mythical “buttery Chardonnays” that came out of California in the early days and are harder to find now. It’s a silky wine with hints of butterscotch on the fig and hazelnut taste profiles. If you’re looking for something a little darker, a little unusual, this is a good bet. It tastes more expensive than its $19 list price, that’s for sure.

The 2010 De Martino Legada Reserva was a close third and I’d gladly buy it to drink again, especially since it’s usually discounted from its $16 list price. This is a more austere, conservative Chardonnay with typical citrus notes and plenty of wood from its 11 months in French oak barrels. Both the minerals and acidity shine through and it’s one to keep sipping for a long period. There’s also an eco-friendly story with this one: De Martino uses lightweight bottles made from recycled materials.

Two of these wines come from grapes grown in the Limari Valley, which is a good one to look for if you’re overwhelmed by a shelf of wine companies you don’t recognize. My favorite had grapes from the Leyda Valley though. Just remember to look for an “L.”

For more information on Chile’s terrific range of both red and white wines, see the excellent Wines of Chile website.

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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!

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.