Pale, peppery and crunchy, light tannin with a rustic country snap
Ageing
1–5 years
Serving
12–14 °C, lightly chilled
País is the conquest's grape, still alive. Listán Prieto arrived with the Spanish missions in the 1550s — planted for the mass before anything else — and remained Chile's most planted variety into the twentieth century, the everyday red of the countryside while Bordeaux grapes took the estates. Then fashion dismissed it as campesino rustic, fit only for bulk.
Its redemption came from what neglect had spared: old dry-farmed bush vines in the southern secano, some of them centuries old, still bearing on granite hills without irrigation. From these a new generation now makes pale, peppery, crunchy reds and the rustic sparkling pipeño — the country's oldest wine culture, four hundred and fifty years on, made new.