St Stephen Organic Vineyards

The winery

St. Stephen Organic Vineyards began with a journey: Tim Edwards, a marketing entrepreneur from California, and his Chilean wife, Claudia, drove across South America by jeep from New Orleans until they settled in Chile. In 2008 they bought a plot in San José de Los Lingues, a small hamlet in the municipality of San Fernando in the Colchagua foothills, and in 2011 they planted the first vines. The name refers to Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr, and also to the Grateful Dead song of the same name; the winery's website devotes a page to each. The project presents itself as a business with a cause: it gives its profits to environmental organizations, and in 2019 it presented at COP25 in Madrid a proposal for funding the fight against climate change.

The Los Lingues vineyard is flat, with dark, well-drained volcanic soils, and is drip-irrigated with Andean meltwater drawn from a deep well. It is farmed without pesticides, fungicides or herbicides, with sheep keeping the weeds down between the rows, and the grapes are picked by hand in April; the technical sheets indicate organic certification from Kiwa BCS. St. Stephen has no cellar of its own: it makes its wines at third-party facilities with winemaker José Antonio Bravo von Bischoffshausen, who previously worked for Emiliana, Undurraga and Concha y Toro, among others. Production is small, fewer than a thousand cases a year according to a 2020 interview, and is split into two lines. Oda al Vino, named after the Pablo Neruda poem, brings together a Cabernet Sauvignon and a Carmenere from Los Lingues aged in French oak barrels. Am, a Mapuche word the winery translates as beautiful spirit, adds a Malbec from Sagrada Familia, in the Curicó Valley, and a Carmenere that its technical sheet places in the Maipo Valley.

St. Stephen has no tasting room and publishes no visits: in 2020 the owners said that when they do receive someone, they open a bottle in the middle of the vineyard. Its wines have been sold mainly in the United States, through the family's company in San José, California, wine brokers in that state and shops such as the Jimbo's chain in San Diego; no points of sale were found in Chile, and the website's online store is out of service. The most recent vintages shown on the site run from 2017 to 2019, so write to info@ststephen.cl before hunting for its bottles or planning a stop in Los Lingues.