Cristobal ‘Toti’ Undurraga has been director of wine at Doña Paula for a year – about the same length of time as the current president of Argentina has been in the hotseat. He tells Sarah Neish about vineyard discoveries and the shapeshifting nature of the nation’s economy. Doña Paula’s director of wine Cristobal Undurraga, or Toti as he is affectionately known, is wonderfully warm and easy company. While other wine world glitterati introduced me to some of Santiago’s finest restaurants when I visited Chile in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic in 2021, Toti welcomed me into his home, cooked us first-rate steaks over his living room fire, and poured inky glasses of Carmenere while we sank into battered sofas to drink them. His six dogs (two of which, I discover, have sadly departed since then) were never far from sight. At that time Toti was filling me in on the bustling biological corridors in the vineyards of his own Chilean family wine label Koyle, but by December 2023 his career had changed track having taken on the role of director of wine at esteemed Argentine producer Doña Paula. Chilean by birth, Toti still lives in Santiago and travels every two weeks to Mendoza. It’s not his first stint working in Argentina either. He left Mendoza in 2007 after a four-year chapter as head enologist with Viña Kaiken, and has always wanted to return. “I really connected with the Andes when I was there,” he tells db. “For me, I
This Article was originally published on The Drink Business - Wine
