Viña Maitia 2023 “Aupa” Pipeño

This wine is a blend of 80% Pais and 20% Carignan from the southern Maule region of Chile and is made in an old style called Pipeño. The wine is light in color with bright notes of crushed raspberry, wild strawberry, and rose petals that lead into underlying hints of dried herbs, mint leaves, fennel and thyme. This fruit driven, easy drinking wine with a bit of animale has fresh acid with low tannin and can be enjoyed with a slight chill.

Pipeño is the traditional method of winemaking in Chile, which dates back to the late 16th century. The Aupa Pipeño from Viña Maitia is an old school blend of 80% País (aka Mission/Listan Negro/Criolla Grande) and 20% Carignan from a 10 hectare, 120-year-old, dry farmed vineyard in the Maule Valley of Chile. This valley benefits from a Mediterranean-like climate where high temperatures in the summer are cooled by the breeze from the Humboldt Current in the Pacific Ocean. Pipeño is a very rustic wine, especially when produced with País, a sacramental grape which was the first grape planted in the Americas, brought here by the Spanish. The País grapes are removed from the clusters manually by being hit over a zaranda, a metal grid that acts as destemmer and press, to a traditional concrete vat, where a natural yeast fermentation takes place. The Carignan is fermented with whole clusters, and then the blend is aged briefly in concrete before bottling into flint glass at a 12.9% ABV with small amounts of sulfur.

Frenchman David Marcel is the producer and winemaker of Viña Maitia with his Chilean wife Loreto in the Maule Valley of Chile. Marcel comes from the French Basque Country and has been involved with wine in Chile for a long time. He was one of the first winemakers in Chile to succeed in the production of quality, craft Pipeño starting with the 2013 vintage, and a Carignan called Weon starting in 2016. The combination of the traditional production method and the traditional grape varieties lead to a very unique, herbal, and quaffable wines that are incredible values. Aupa!