Viña Ranquilhue

The winery

Viña Ranquilhue is the project of the Novoa family, who sign their wines as Nicolás Novoa Family Wines. It dates back to 2012, when Diego Nicolás Novoa, the youngest of four siblings and an agricultural engineer and winemaker trained at the Universidad de La Frontera, set up a small vine nursery with his parents, Nanci and Jalil, on a family farm near Villarrica. After working as a winemaker in central Chile and doing harvests in Chile, California and South Africa, in 2016 he began making his own wines and brought his siblings Carla, Paula and Andrés into the project. Today Diego makes the wines and welcomes visitors, while the rest of the family shares out label design, communications, trade fairs and customer service. The labels carry the drawing of a bird that, in the family's telling, flies over their vineyards and ties them together.

The vineyard you visit is in the rural area of Ranquilhue, in the municipality of Pumanque, in the dry-farmed (secano) part of the Colchagua Valley, toward the O'Higgins coast. It is one hectare of Carménère, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Sauvignon at the foot of hills covered in scrub and forest, worked with regenerative agriculture: a biological corridor helps keep pests in check and the energy comes from solar panels. These grapes go into the Pumanquino line and Matilda, a blend of the three varieties that the family presents as its first super-premium wine. A second family vineyard in Coronel de Maule, near Cauquenes, in the dry-farmed interior of the Maule, supplies País from century-old vines for a rosé and a blanc de noir sparkling wine, as well as Carignan and Portugais Bleu; the Trashumante line adds a Sauvignon Blanc from the Leyda Valley. These are small-production, minimal-intervention wines, made at a cellar that is not on the vineyard, so the visit is above all about the land.

All activities are booked in the winery's online store, at least 12 hours ahead, and Diego himself leads them. Tastings last about an hour: you walk the vineyard glass in hand, see how the solar energy and the biological corridor work, and taste three reds from the vineyard or four wines starting with the País rosé, served with homemade bread and labneh. In “Haz tu Propio Vino” (Make Your Own Wine) each participant tastes, builds their own blend, bottles it, corks it and puts on a handmade label to take home; the version with a country lunch, from roughly 11:00 to 14:00, adds carne a la olla (a slow-cooked beef stew), salads and homemade desserts. From Thursday to Sunday there is also a picnic for two with a bottle of your choice and homemade nibbles among the vines or under the pergola. There is no restaurant or accommodation, and pets are welcome.