Louis-Antoine Luyt Pipeño Carrizal 2019

Pipeño Carrizal is 100% País sourced from grower Ernesto Soto, whose vines are planted on deep, sandy, decomposed-granite soils in the Maule Valley, roughly 150 miles south of Santiago. The fruit is organically farmed and the wine is made in the traditional pipeño style: hand-harvested, de-stemmed over a zaranda, fermented with native yeasts in open-top lagares, then racked into stainless steel for two months before bottling with a small addition of sulfur. A saignée is performed to bleed off juice and concentrate the wine slightly before fermentation.

Pipeño is a colloquial — and historically derogatory — Chilean term for farmer wine, typically made from País, the mission grape brought to Chile by Spanish colonizers in the 16th century. Luyt turned this label into a badge of honor, building a négociant model around individual smallholder farmers whose names appear on the back labels. The Carrizal bottling is one of several single-site pipeños, each reflecting the distinct character of its grower and location within Maule.

In the glass, Carrizal shows a medium-purple color with ruby hues. The nose is dark-fruited and earthy, with cooked berry, leather, and a subtle drift of dried rose petal. On the palate it is dry, with high acidity, modest tannin, and a peppery, leathery finish that gives it a more structured, almost feral edge compared to the lighter bottlings in the Pipeño range. Comes in a one-liter bottle.