In 1997, two leading wine families, the Rothschilds and the Guilisastis, joined forces to create Almaviva, a château-concept Bordeaux blend showcasing the terroir of Chile’s Maipo Valley. In the first instalment of a two-part interview, Rafael Guilisasti and Philippe Sereys de Rothschild tell Richard Woodard how the project came about – and why Almaviva today has ‘to fight’ to maintain its status. Almaviva in 2024 is firmly established at or near the zenith of Chilean winemaking. The first non-Bordeaux wine to be sold via La Place de Bordeaux, it has grown accustomed to the trappings of global fine wine stardom – 100-point scores, regular appearances in the glossy sale catalogues of the world’s leading wine auction houses. But turn the clock back to Almaviva’s genesis in the mid- to late 1990s, and the possibility of such elevated achievements was far from obvious. For all its long winemaking history, Chile was only just registering on the radar of most global wine drinkers, and mainly as the source of good-value bottles for everyday drinking. A high-concept, château-focused Bordeaux blend with pricing to match its lofty ambitions… wasn’t that, at the time, a bit of a leap of faith? “You are right, but that’s in the broad sense of things,” responds Philippe Sereys de Rothschild, chairman and CEO of Baron Philippe de Rothschild SA, owner of Château Mouton Rothschild and joint venture partner in Almaviva alongside Viña Concha y Toro. “We were looking into it with much more detail. We were looking into
This Article was originally published on The Drink Business - Fine Wine
