Exploring Altair winery & Cachapoal Andes with winemaker Gabriel Mustakis

Winemaker Gabriel Mustakis talks about the terroir in Cachapoal Andes and the diversity in soils. Interview by Amanda Barnes, author of The South America Wine Guide, for https://southamericawineguide.com To read more about Altair winery in Cachapoal Andes, Chile, visit: https://southamericawineguide.com/win... Want to learn more about the wines of Chile? Get The Chile Wine Guide now! https://southamericawineguide.com/pro... For more wine from South America, follow us on Instagram:   / southamericawineguide   Transcript of the video: Gabriel, we are overlooking Altair terroir. Can you tell me about the diversity of the vineyard and the different soils and altitudes? At the back, you can see how diverse the geography is here. In the middle of the property, we have a creek that has water running the whole year. We have different kinds of soils, they are mainly colluvial in the slopes and we have these rocks that roll from the Andes and deposit in the middle of the property, which in turn mix with the colluvial soil so we have many different parcels that give us a big diversity in terms of texture and the profile of the wines. With this amphitheater of vineyards, we can select the parcels and make our three icon wines: Altair, Cabo de Hornos and Sideral.  So you have the colluvial soils up towards the winery and where are the alluvial soils? The colluvial soil is mainly in the slopes so Altair comes from those slopes as the texture is more elegant, thinner in the mid palate and very long and elegant. Along the sides of the creek, you have the alluvial soil so we have some vineyards that have more gravels and sandy soils and these give us more textured wines and more mid palate, and these vines are used for Cabo de Hornos. For Sideral, we use a mix of the colluvial and alluvial soils that give us a different texture and volume. It is a very good wine to introduce Cachapoal Andes for people to understand how this place is. And how would you say that Cachapoal Andes is different from Maipo Andes and Colchagua Andes? Here you get your own diversity and this makes a big difference. In Cachapoal we get two things that we think are very important. First of all, the diversity of rocks in the alluvial and the colluvial soil. These give us in our Cabernet Sauvignon wine a very fresh and rocky character. Cachapoal is a valley in the middle of Maipo and Colchagua and in the middle of the Andes Mountains and the coastal range so we have a big diversity in terms of soil and exposition. It is truly a very complex spot.