Finally our first wine is bottled and ready to be drunk! TINTE is a natural wine* lovingly crafted from our dry farmed and very old Pais vines. We give you the raw flavours of our varied soil and nature’s yeast with nothing added to the organic grapes from vineyard to bottle. TINTE allows us to share with you the beauty and integrity of the land here at Fundo Meza. You can buy TINTE here.
We have found TINTE is best drunk chilled before or after dinner. It can also be a nice accompaniment with salads or spicy food…but everyone’s tastes are different so experiment for yourself.
We started making wine a few years ago, the first batches had a few quirks but thanks to some great advice from the local Maule young winemakers club we were able to develop techniques that allow the grape and lands to be fully expressed in TINTE.
This is the beauty of natural wines, they have an integrity to the grape and the land, rich nutritious soils and warm air create an exciting flavourful wine. This also means each year will be a new experience, a new wine. Enjoy!
Why TINTE tastes like it does:
Our 100 year old Pais vines are dry farmed (we never water them) and soak up the strong sun and elements in Chile, which ensures the strong unique flavours of the grapes.
Our small farm is certified organic but our approach is beyond organic,we practise something closer to natural agriculture and don’t do anything to the vines other than gently prune them and thin them in early Summer (to make the agraz).
When the grapes have turned red we hand-harvest them, press them and store the juice in a mixture of small steel tanks and old oak barrels. The unique pinky orange colour of our wine is formed at this point because we don’t add back in the red skins for the fermentation. The natural yeast on the grapes starts the fermentation and we allow the grapes to ferment fully over about 9 months in one long cycle. This is truly a natural wine, no artificial yeast or sulphates are use to start/stop the fermentation process…the grapes are in charge.
*natural wine means the wine was made on a small-scale using very traditional methods with minimum intervention, really allowing the flavour of the land to determine the characteristics of the wine. We rely on natural yeasts on the grapes and in the air and don’t add any sulphates (although some natural wines do contain sulphates). Rather than the idea of a ‘conventional red or white wine’, natural wines are exciting because of their wide variety of colours, flavours – each bottle a new experience, the true tastes of a particular place on our planet, unlike any other.