Las Fermentadas - La Sangrada Pais 2021

Very fresh and light bodied, with a crunchy texture on the palate and a herbaceous yet savoury character. Slightly rustic in style, with notes of red cherry, anise, and sage.

Great served with a chill, and alongside salty food!

NERD NOTES

Vineyard:

• 100% País, Quirihue, Itata.
• Chemical free no-till farming.
• 150 yr old, dry grown bush vines. 

Winemaking:

Winemakers:

• Coline Marre (Lead Winemaker) - A French oenologist
• Isi Munita - A 'raw-milk cheesemaker and chef'
• Alice L'Estrange - Founder of Las Fermentadas winery

We picked 3 tonnes of grapes from this very old and very beautiful site in Quirihue. The vines are at the bottom of the hill so they see more water and nutrients, it’s a naturally healthy and biodiverse organic system, the opposite soil health next to the eroded and compacted slope. We want to champion sites that are self-sustaining into the future when rainfall will become more erratic and set slopes with no top-soil harder to farm. The valley floors are teeming with life and we wanted to try a couple of different winemaking techniques to see what these vigorous vines can do. Having a high amount of foliage and bigger yield than vines on poor soils, the grapes struggle to fully ripen and this site naturally produces a low-alcohol wine.

La Sangrada means The Saignée. We destemmed and bled the juice off for four days. Just one racking before bottling, the wine sat on gross lees and under flor for 11 months. No additions at any point. The idea was a very fresh, light, crunchy, herbaceous and savoury expression of País, bottled with some fine lees this saignée is free and wild, great salty food wine and unlike any País we’ve tried before. 

Original pencil drawing of a blood stain by Catalina Munita.

ABOUT LAS FERMENTADAS

"My winery is open to any woman who wants to invest in and make natural wine and ferments. It's a difficult industry to learn in for anyone, especially for women, and especially in deeply machista and discriminatory rural Chile. Women are invited to make natural wine collaboratively: we all buy the grapes (each woman buying what she can afford) and make the wines together, usually with one of us leading the winemaking decisions. We then buy bottles and corks, collaborate with female artists for the labels, find buyers, export, pay income tax - the whole process. I provide the space, the fermenters, the logistics chain, but the idea is that each woman understands and takes a risk in the whole process, and she has the opportunity to springboard from there if they choose. My collaborator Cindy Azua is the original fermentada, she now as her own label that I proudly import. In 2021 Isi Munita (raw-milk cheesemaker and chef) and Coline Marre (french oenologist) joined the winery team, and these wines have just landed in Australia. In 2022 vigneron Soledad Caamaño contributed her grapes and hands. We have learnt so much from making wine collaboratively and working in a radically different environment." - Alice L’Estrange