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Garage Wine Co 3.0Garage Wine Co 3.0

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  • Wines
    • Cru
      • Cru Truquilemu
        Carignan
      • Vigno
        Carignan
    • Limited Release
      • Isidore Vineyard
        Semillón – #F_
      • Truquilemu Vineyard
        Carignan – #_7
    • Parcels / Vinos de Parcela
      • Pirque Vineyard
        Cabernet Franc – #_0
      • Reelegido Vineyard
        Cabernet Sauvignon – #_1
      • Las Higueras Vineyard
        Cabernet Franc – #_2
      • Old Vine Pale
        Carignan, Mataró – #_3
      • Renacido Vineyard
        Cabernet Sauvignon – #_4
      • Sauzal Vineyard
        Carignan, Garnacha, Mataró – #_5
      • Bagual Vineyard Caliboro
        Carignan, Garnacha, Mataró – #_6
      • Truquilemu Vineyard
        Syrah – #_8
      • Bagual Vineyard Caliboro
        Garnacha Field-blend – #_9
    • Single Ferment Series
      • País-Cariñena
        Phoenix Ferment
      • País
        215 BC Ferment
      • País
        AlMaule
      • Cinsault
        Soothsayer´s Ferment
        • Cinsault
          Recodo Vnyrd
          Lot 98
      • Quinto Cuarto
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País
AlMaule

  • VarietalPaís
  • VintageSince 2021
  • D.OSecano Interior, Cauquenes
  • Bottles filled1200
  • CATEGORY Village
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Quinto Cuarto

In a Nutshell – In these times this unexpected delight has become a moniker for making a more complete and flavourful use of wonderful ingredients in the kitchen or on the farm. – Sometimes in the cellar a particular barrel simply does not fit with the others. It’s delicious but it is too hard– unready.

  • VarietalCabernet del Maipo, Carignan, Garnacha, Mataró, País, Cinsault
  • VintageWithout
  • D.O.Solera
  • CATEGORY Village
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Cinsault
Secano Interior – Coelemu
Soothsayer´s Ferment
Single Ferment Series

In a Nutshell 3 farms 1 wine : Single Ferment Series wines include fruit from more than one parcel or vineyard site and are (co-fermented) ¨in one singular ferment ¨. All of the fruit does not enter the tank at same time. When each vineyard is ready, we simply stack on top of the fermenting

  • VarietalCinsault
  • VintageSince 2015
  • D.O.Secano Interior - Coelemu
  • Bottles filled5 000 approx.
  • CATEGORY Village
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Phoenix Ferment
País-Cariñena
Secano Interior Cauquenes
Single Ferment Series

In a Nutshell Phoenix is sourced from various families who form a part of our working team. It has become a kind of convoy picking day with small quantities picked in various sites. In this way we insure that more families benefit from the proper price paid for these grapes. House note This wine will

  • VarietalPaís, Carignan
  • VintageSince 2017
  • D.O.Secano Interior Cauquenes
  • Bottles filled5 000 approx.
  • CATEGORY Village
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País 215 BC Ferment
Secano Interior – Cauquenes
Single Ferment Series

In a Nutshell – A winery was making País in Portezuelo in 1548. (documented) – Cab Sauv (cross of CF & SB) is documented from 1763 (near Bordeaux) – The difference: 1763 – 1548 = 215 thus: 215 yrs before Cabernet Single Ferment Series wines include fruit from more than one parcel or vineyard site

  • VarietalPaís
  • VintageSince 2015
  • D.OSecano Interior, Cauquenes
  • Bottles filled6 500
  • CATEGORY Village
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Garage Wine Co
Winery: Camino San Antonio Caliboro KM 5.8 San Javier 3660000
Región del Maule, Chile

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  • Caliboro

About Garage Wine Co.

Garage Wine began quite literally in Pilar and Derek’s Garage. After half a dozen vintages making wine for an informal market of family and friends, it began exporting to UK & Denmark in 2006

The Parcels

GWCo 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: Bagual, Caliboro, Coelemu, Guarilihue, Loncomilla, Portezuelo, Puico, Ranquil, Sauzal, Truquilemu…

Over the years working in the community we have raised a veritable posse of vineyard hands whose skills are working the vineyards the old way / the traditional way— originario. We cultivate vineyards with small vigneron partners who work with horse and plough as his family has done for generations. Some of the parcels, where the next generation moved to the city, we have opted to rent long-term creating more work for the local hands who do want to stay on the farm.

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The vineyards are on the old Coastal Range of mountains closer to the Pacific — Chile’s other mountains. These are older and cooled more slowly so they have granitic soils, many with intrusions and cracks for roots to get deep down into. When GWCo. speaks of the provenance of our wines however we mean more than just the geology of the terroir. This is a good start, but we are convinced the farming practices that have evolved over generations have as much to do with the wines’ personalities as the soils. The regeneration of the vineyards long since neglected depends upon this farming.

GWCo. also makes an old-vine Cab Franc (old bush head vines) and a Cab Sauv blend in the Maule as well as two Cabs mountain-grown in the Maipo where the firm began in 2003.

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,ooo kilos at a time.

Single Ferment Series Wines

Pais & Cinsault in the Secano Interior, the cradle of the original Chilean viticulture, have been forever the victim of commodity pricing. When GWCo saw its Carignan growers being paid paltry sums for their other fruit we began acquiring small bits from various farmers to experiment. From the beginning, we paid bonafide prices that would allow for the traditional field works to cultivate the soil properly to continue into the future. Commercial bottlings of “Single Ferments” began with serendipity when we simply could not resist not one but three small bits of Cinsault. And then promptly plain ran out of tanks to ferment them in. With nowhere to put all three, we simply stacked the second bit of newly harvested fruit on top of the first already fermenting—and then the third on top of both, creating one single fermentation from the fruit of three farms. We adopted the same technique with Pais and subsequently named both wines: Single Ferment Series.

The Nitty Gritty

In these times it is important to stand for what you believe in, and more importantly to build the kind of business you believe in. At Garage Wine Co. we revive old vineyards in marginalized Chilean communities to make coveted wines. We’ve positioned these wines in a dozen established fine wine markets around the world and we grow. The wines are not made to be expensive per se, but they are found on the higher shelves– they need to command a price that allows for proper farming. What we have discovered is that the long-term practices of regenerative farming not only make for better fruit and thus more flavourful wine, but that such a business can become a force for financial, community and environmental good.

The Baby and the Bathwater  

As South American wine exports have boomed over the last quarter-century, it has grown increasingly difficult for small farmers to sell their old-vine grapes at a proper price – a price that can consistently sustain family and community. Mainstream buyers want more for less and they would have the growers modernise. The modern wine business calls for spraying instead of cultivating, scaling instead of focusing, and above all: reducing the cost of labour. But with the old vineyards, the labour is precisely where one finds the wisdom of farming passed down through the ages. Throwing that away would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Regenerative Farming

Farming in the Secano Interior, the Maule and Itata valleys of Southern Chile, has been a way of life since Colonial times. Not just vineyards, but mixed farming of heritage seed wheat, free-range livestock and local market produce. Small-scale farms use dry-farming methods: turning over the earth to capture scarce seasonal rainwater, and nutrients from the clever use of seasonal cover crops that in turn help sequester carbon from the air, and the use of horses to get into rows where tractors can’t reach.

This is where GWCo. works; too far from the comfort zone of those in the mainstream. These vineyards were neglected and relegated to bulk wine for decades because the booming market wanted branded varietals that didn’t command a price to support the work.

For more than a decade GWCo. has worked these old vines, there has been a marked improvement both in vineyard health and quality of the fruit produced.

The marrying of the fieldcraft of these small-scale farmers with the lens of modern science and GWCo’s mindful winemaking took a decade, but the marriage has proven successful not just for GWCo, but also for the farmers, our suppliers and customers alike. Over the past few years, we have begun to rent and in some cases acquire the property underneath the old vines. Today one-third of our production is worked our way with our own people.

Necessity was the mother of sustainability

Sustainability for us was never about seals and certifications. We became sustainable just trying to survive being small in an industry geared to the big. Vintage after vintage we made our way through a series of necessary work-arounds, finding a way forward, that only later would be seen to be sustainable.

Recycled bottles – Because our production runs were small we were challenged when it came to dry-goods. When bottle makers refused to deliver to us, we found a local bottle recycler who became a trusted partner. This small business employs workers in a rural part of the country where stable and safe work is hard to find. What we learned is that when bottles are manufactured they have a limited shelf-life on the factory patio—a best before date if you will. Today we buy these bottles and wash them before use. This is glass that would otherwise have been smashed and melted and remade—without ever having been used. What is the carbon footprint of a bottle manufactured twice to be used once?

Labels & Packaging— We learned to paint / silk-screen bottles because our bottlings were so small that the label printers did not want to work with us. The industry was geared to long print runs and said there was no money in printing 1200 labels. So we built a custom machine and found experienced hands with silk-screening. Luis, our bottle painter, has been painting bottles for us for 11 years now. (Chile’s first hotel built entirely of recycled materials: The WineBox, has adapted out bottles for their lamps today.)

What’s with the wax? - Regular capsules were also sold with a minimum far larger than our needs, so we found a school supply firm that would make us food-safe wax for seals from crayon wax.

All of these workarounds-- bothers slash hassles at the time, led to a positive and durable differentiation in packaging. We have continued to work with earth-friendly inks for silk screening and recycled materials for cases.

Fermentation tanks: Unable to buy new tanks— designed to make mainstream wines, large, expensive and inflexible in their design, we took the leftover cuttings and scraps of a large stainless manufacturer and pieced together Lagars (traditional word for open tanks). We did it for far less money and the upcycling created opportunities for local welding shops.

Fruit: Years ago we bought from mainstream growers. When we made a crackerjack wine, the grower would use the prestige with critics to sell our fruit to someone bigger / better known leaving us without said fruit and without continuity in our portfolio. After two or three experiences such as this, frustrated, we went South to the Secano to work with growers unknown, unpolished, and disconnected from the mainstream. Working closely with small growers far from the beaten path, we found diamonds in the rough. When the polishing was done we had forged a bond with the growers—partnerships that we have continued to build upon with others in the neighbourhood.

Diverse leadership

Let’s face it, the wine business can be conservative, clubby and patriarchic. Having a female lead our work helps us work with our growers and suppliers on a different footing. We also like to mix scientists with field hands. Instead of contracting the cheapest bused-in labour, we keep it local where there are more experienced hands. Mercenary piecework doesn’t work — proper sourcing does. It’s a mouthful, but in a phrase: the difference created by the discretionary effort released when you work in good faith with local farmhands is so much more than the savings that might be achieved from cost-cutting, that there’s no comparing the two. We have never looked back.

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T: +56 9 9750 0379
Email: info@garagewineco.cl

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