RAVANAL

Viña Ravanal sits in Placilla, at the eastern end of the Colchagua Valley, beside the old San Fernando–Pichilemu rail line. Mario Ravanal — eldest of eight, raised by a farmer father — studied agronomy at the Universidad de Chile and went to France in 1960 for postgraduate work in enology and viticulture at Montpellier and Bordeaux.

On a visit home in 1965 he heard a property in Placilla was for sale, bought it for the vineyards already producing on it, and has spent the sixty years since among them. Some of those vines are over a hundred years old and were bearing fruit long before the family arrived.

His three children — Carmen Paz, Pía and Mario Sebastián — are all enologists and run the estate today. Every vineyard is family-owned, in Placilla and San José de Manantiales, and everything is hand-picked. The valley floor runs stony, clay and deep alluvial, with a sharp day–night temperature swing off the Tinguiririca: slow ripening, low yields, and concentration as the payoff.