The historic heart of Chilean wine, the Maipo Valley wraps around Santiago and climbs toward the Andes, and it is above all Cabernet country — the source of the country's most celebrated, structured, blackcurrant-and-mint reds. The founding estates planted French vines here in the nineteenth century, and the tradition of powerful Maipo Cabernet has never broken.
The higher, alpine-influenced sites toward the mountains give the wines a fresh, minty lift and firm structure; the warmer valley floor makes riper, rounder reds. Phylloxera has never reached Chile, so the vines grow on their own roots. Maipo is, quite simply, the birthplace of fine Chilean wine.