the World Emilia (from the book) rode into
Chilean Wine in 1891: The World Emilia Rode Into
The novel’s Chile chapters land in the middle of a genuinely pivotal moment for Chilean wine, even though the war itself, not wine, is what is on the page.
The Bordeaux transplant, a few decades earlier
Chile’s modern wine industry effectively began around 1851, when landowner Silvestre Ochagavia imported French vines, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Sauvignon Blanc, and Semillon, and hired French winemakers to plant them in the Bordeaux style. Wealthy Chilean families, flush with mining wealth and eager to emulate French culture, followed his lead over the following decades, building estates modeled on Bordeaux chateaux around Santiago and the Central Valley. Concha y Toro, still one of Chile’s largest producers today, was founded in 1883, just eight years before the war the novel covers.
Phylloxera devastating Europe, sparing Chile
Starting around 1863, phylloxera, a root louse, was wiping out vineyards across France and the rest of Europe. Chile, protected by the Andes, the Pacific, and the Atacama Desert, was essentially the one major wine region on earth the louse never reached. By the 1870s and 1880s, Chile had become a source of healthy, ungrafted European vine cuttings that Europe drew on to help rebuild.
A boom, right on schedule
Chile began exporting wine to Europe in 1877, and by the mid-1880s Chilean wines were being successfully marketed there. By 1891, when Emilia arrives in the middle of civil war, Chile’s wine industry was in the middle of a genuine export boom, riding the coattails of Europe’s crisis. It is a fitting bit of dramatic irony for the book: the same gentleman farmer aristocratic class Emilia encounters through her father’s family, old Chilean money importing French taste, is the same class that was simultaneously building Chile’s wine industry in a very similar spirit.
A detail worth mentioning for the night
Carmenere, now Chile’s signature grape, was actually misidentified as Merlot for over a century. The mix up was not caught until DNA testing in the 1990s. The Carmenere poured for this pairing would not have been known by that name in 1891; it was hiding in plain sight in the same vineyards Emilia’s father’s class was already cultivating.
