Where to stay

The Aubrey At the foot of St Cristobel Hill (the zoo is directly above it) this boutique hotel on the edge of Bella Vista, the partying quarter of Santiago, is well run, friendly and hip. The once privately-owned mansion boasts 15 rooms with private terraces. Rooms from £150. Constitución 317 Providencia, Santiago, Chile, 00 56 29 402 800, theaubrey.com

Casa Lapostolle World-class wines and four guest houses (Relais & Chateaux). About £750 per night for two, including full board and wine tastings. Cunaquito, Santa Cruz, 00 56 72 953 300,lapostolle.com

Casa Silva Small, rustic but elegant country hotel attached to the winery. Its restaurant is a few hundred yards away through the vineyards. Rooms from about £95. Dinner £100 for two including wine (and maybe a free view of a polo match outside). Hijuela Norte, San Fernando, 00 56 72 710 180, casasilva.cl

Matetic Its La Casona B&B is a beautifully appointed hacienda surrounded by manicured gardens a few miles from the winery. Rooms about £450 per night for two including full board. Langunillas, 00 56 25 858 197, mateticvineyards.com

Vik The four-room guesthouse here must be one of the most stunning winery locations in the world. Home cooking is simple and delicious, ideally suited to the place, and the wine is outstanding. Full board and tasting about £625 for two – good value given the price of the wine. Millahue, 00 56 22 482 218, vik.cl

Travel Information

The currency in Chile is the Chilean peso (£1 = CLP765). For most of the year, Chile is four hours behind GMT, but from mid-December to late March its daylight-saving time means it’s three hours behind. Stretching from the driest desert on Earth in the north to ice fields in the south, Chile’s climate is as varied as its landscape. In general, spring and early summer is a good time to visit the central region, which enjoys a Mediterraneanstyle climate. The south is more humid, with greater rainfall and lower temperatures and is best experienced in the summer (December to March). The dry northern regions, with their desert climate of very hot days and equally cold nights, can be visited throughout the year.

GETTING THERE
LAN Airlines (lan.com) flies daily from London to Santiago.

RESOURCES
Turismo Chile (00 56 2 731 8336, chile.travel) has useful information for planning your trip to the country, including details on local culture, food and wine, and listings of upcoming events.

FURTHER READING
Chile: A Traveler’s Literary Companion edited by Katherine Silver (Whereabouts Press, £7.99). A concise introduction to Chile’s literature and land using 22 short stories from its greatest writers, including Pablo Neruda.
Tasting Chile: A Celebration of Authentic Chilean Foods and Wines (Hippocrene Books, £20.99) by Daniel Joelson. More than 140 traditional recipes alongside wine recommendations. Includes salsas and empanadas as well as more exotic fare, such as fried frog’s legs.

Where to eat

Astrid y Gaston Fashionable and highly regarded outpost of South America’s most famous chef. About £90 for two. Antonio Bellet 201, Providencia, Santiago, 00 56 26 509 125, astridygaston.com.

Boragó Owned and operated by a young chef, the tasting menus here capture the unique flavours of Chile with visually compelling dishes. An eight-course menu for two costs £130, including wine matching. 8369 Vitracura, Santiago, 00 56 29 538 893,borago.cl

Casas del Bosque The stand-alone restaurant at this excellent winery offers cooking in a fresh and well-judged brasserie style. The region makes sauvignons and chardonnays similar in style to those produced in New Zealand. Lunch or dinner for two from £50. Calle Hijuela 2, Centro Ex Fundo Sant, Valparaíso, 00 56 23 779 431, casasdelbosque.cl

Coquinaria Chile’s answer to Dean & Deluca, this restaurant-deli serves Mediterranean cuisine with South American flavourings. Great wines and Chilean ingredients. About £60 for two. Isidora Goyenechea 3000, local S-101, Subsuelo, Las Condes/Santiago, 00 56 24 51958, coquinaria.cl

Food Glossary

Araucaria

Edible seeds of the monkey puzzle tree. Similar to large pine nuts.

Carménère

Principal grape used in Chilean winemaking.

Cebiche

Same as ceviche: marinated raw seafood; often white fish but can also be crustaceans or shellfish.

Charqui

Dried and salted meat similar to beef jerky.

Choclo

Like a cottage pie but with meat and chicken underneath a polenta-like maize meal topping.

Curanto

Sausage and shellfish stew.

Empanadas

Filled savoury pastries ranging in size from hand-held to several kilos.

Locos

Abalone; prized shellfish with mother-of-pearl shells – now farmed.

Manjar

Reduced, toffee-ish milk dessert like the Spanish dulce de leche.

Mero

Sometimes called Chilean seabass, actually the Patagonian toothfish.

Merken

Seasoning made from dried and smoked red chillies, toasted coriander seeds, cumin and salt.

Mote

Soaked cereal grains.

Mote con huesillo

A drink of dried peach or apricot cordial with mote.

Pebre

Salsa made with onion, garlic, coriander, tomato and peppers.

Pisco

Grape brandy.

Porotos con riendas

Beans and spaghetti.

Sopaipillas

Fried cornmeal pastry.

Food and Travel Review

Mapuche Indians fought Spanish conquistadors on Cerro de Santa Lucia, above Santiago, almost 500 years ago. They called it ‘the hill of suffering’ and they are still taking on the vested interests that encroach on their lands to the south today.

It’s a tough contest. Chile’s capital is undergoing seismic change. In downtown ‘Sanhattan’ skyscrapers rise. Gran Torre, the tallest building in Latin America, is receiving a plate-glass cladding. From within its shiny facade, you’ll be able to gaze out to the south and west across townships where the rotos live. The name was once a term of abuse describing ‘the poor and badly educated’. As the country grows more prosperous, it has fallen out of favour. Supplanting it, Chilenidad – Chileanness – reflects the fact that a sense of national identity has started to break down class barriers.

But explore the city that’s the gateway for most of Chile’s visitors and you’ll see the juxtaposition of modern wealth and old poverty applies to far more than architecture. In Centro, men sip froth-topped cortados, espressos ‘cut’ with hot milk, at the counters of cafés con piernas, cafés with legs – a reference to the scantily clad female servers. For a snack they stop by Domino’s to order a completo – a hotdog topped with avocado, mayo and pebre, the local salsa. Meanwhile, in Providencia – the city’s financial centre – business types drop into Coquinaria for steaks seasoned with rica rica, a herb from the Atacama Desert, or spicy merken, a Mapuche seasoning made from dried chillies. A kilo of imported Appenzeller cheese from its deli costs £70; garlic, ‘Viagra of the poor’, is 1,500 pesos (£2) a kilo.

Visit La Vega market on the other side of the Mapucho River and garlic is a thirtieth of the price. ‘Does it work?’ I asked a lady buying a half kilo for her husband. ‘Of course!’, she replied, adding that whether or not it makes his breath smell depends on the preparation. Covering several acres, La Vega is an anarchic mix of fresh produce, fish, meat, dried pulses and pet food. A dish of ‘beans with reins’ (bean and spaghetti soup) at one food stall costs a pound. Choclo, a cornmealtopped cottage pie baked in earthenware, is little more.

The divide, of course, extends to alcohol. Those with the means drink Denominación de Origin wine, Kunstmann beer or pisco sours. Those with little make do with jug wine, maybe split with Coke, or chicha, fermented grape juice. Those with almost nothing wait for the Independence Day fiesta to taste jote de bigoteado, dregs from halfempty glasses and bottles mixed together and sold for a few pesos.

Very different, perhaps, but modern Chile’s diverse worlds exist side by side. Miles apart materially, they share a culinary DNA, with deeprooted interwoven strands of knowledge, tradition and expertise that make for a fascinating visit. And in one surprising location, Boragó, a restaurant near Alonso de Córdoba – the country’s Rodeo Drive of designer label shops – that precious heritage is being revived and preserved in the face of dizzying modernisation.

Its chef-patron Rodolfo Guzman, as handsome as the miniature poached pears dangling from a bonsai elm that he serves with
aperitifs, is on a mission to defend the culinary lore that was once passed down by the Indians: ‘We live so fast, we don’t have time to look behind us and we forget where we came from.’ Like Noma’s René Redzepi in Copenhagen, Guzman and his chefs forage the coastal shoreline and inland. ‘Oncol,’ he says, ‘is a region that never froze during the Ice Age. You can find kangaroos that fit in the palm of your hand and snails the size of footballs.’

The otherworldly diversity of Oncol, a tiny temperate rainforest nature reserve 700km to the south of Santiago, is emblematic of a country that seems to contain all possible terrain within its borders. Chile is a 4,300km ribbon of land stretching from the Atacama Desert in the north – the driest place on Earth, with crystalline night skies that enthrall stargazers – to the valleys and glaciers of Patagonia in the south. The Andes mountains rise in the east; the Pacific Ocean swells against its shores, 175km to the west. In between there are pastures, volcanoes, river valleys, ski resorts, rain forests and fjords. Offshore territories, meanwhile, include Easter Island, with its monolithic moai sentinels, and Robinson Crusoe Island, home to a population of just 850.

A world away from the skyscrapers of Santiago, Guzman is working with environmentalists, biologists and botanists to catalogue the edible wild resources of this singularly heterogeneous terrain. His Endémica menu plays with the tricks popularised by Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal. The slow-cooked egg is coated in what appears to be ash but is in fact dried squid ink. Tepu-wood smoke poured from a teapot wafts over smoked ox cheek. Tart, bright red haws spiked on thorns decorate ice cream, and monkey puzzle – araucaria – pine kernels form a dip of ‘edible soil’.

Chile’s Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda wrote an ode to the tree: ‘Flag of winter, ship of fragrance’. He also penned ones to onions, to tomatoes, to a lemon, to corn, to an artichoke (‘delicate hearted… beneath its waterproof scales’) and to potato chips.

San Fernando, Colchagua province’s main town, is an hour’s drive south from Santiago along Ruta 5, the Pan American Highway. It would be easy to wax poetical about the fruit and vegetable stalls lining the roadside by the Municipal Stadium. It would be, if it weren’t for the effort spent dodging carreteros. These tricycles, frontloaded with cabbages and potatoes, pedal between pedestrians, empanada hawkers, and carts selling mote con huesillo, a cordial of dried peach served over a thick layer of softened wheat grains.

The region is famous for oranges, but boasts two sexier stars. Chilean rodeo, the national sport, encourages a pair of huasos, cowboys, to chase a cow around a crescent-shaped corral where they score points by crushing it against a padded barrier with their horses. The other genuine diva is the red carménère grape. Crushing it has brought international fame to more than one winery.

Carménère was part of the classic Bordeaux blend until the mid- 19th century when it was wiped out by the phylloxera that devastated Europe’s vines. The guilty aphids never made it to Chile, where the grape survived. Treated as a merlot substitute, it fell out of favour, a Cinderella to its cabernet sauvignon, syrah and pinot noir sisters.

Now winemakers are falling over each other to adopt it. Casa Silva, on the outskirts of San Fernando, collects awards for fun with its Los Lingues Gran Reserva. Casa Lapostolle’s vineyard and winery, Clos Apalta, turns out iconic wines ‘smooth as ruffled velvet’ thanks to its old carménère vines – with an assist from cabernet sauvignon.

Neruda was a card-holding communist yet owned three houses and never saw this as a contradiction. He loved his tipple, so he would have had no problem buying it from Alexandra Marnier-Lapostolle (heiress to the Grand Marnier liqueur empire). Big business and big fortunes have funded the push to produce fine wines. Miguel Torres from Spain is the obvious name to drop. Juan Cuneo Solari, an Italian farmer, set up Casas del Bosque in the colder Casablanca Valley, noted for sauvignon, chardonnay and pinot noir.

The Matetic family, emigrants from Croatia about 100 years ago, made one fortune out of barbed wire fencing and another cattle ranching in Patagonia before setting up their biodynamic winery in 1999. Sheep and alpaca crop the weeds between espaliers of grapes, and chickens supply the egg whites that clarify the must.

No vineyard is complete without its guest houses and restaurant. Casa Silva’s dining room looks out onto a polo field and, on match days, doubles as the team clubhouse. The edible chukkas here begin with abalone and cheese empanadita tapas before switching to cebiche or razor clam soup. Next, in order, comes Patagonian toothfish, lamb ravioli, loin of wagyu beef and for dessert maracuya custard with a glass of late harvest semillon-gewürztraminer.

The name of Millahue, 500km south of Santiago, means ‘the place of gold’ in the language of the Mapuche people. A local myth claims a prospector struck it rich, went to Santiago with a nugget to have his find confirmed and died on the way back. The spot where he found the gold was lost, not surprising in an area of scrub-coated hills and valleys spread over 40,000 square kilometres.

Norwegian Alex Vik bought the land not for gold mining but ‘to make the best wine in the world’. A latter-day Viking, he operates, according to Forbes, ‘businesses on three continents in fields ranging from web-enterprise software to luxury hotels, investments, real estate development, agriculture, and wine and spirits’.

His Vik holistic winery takes Aristotle’s phrase ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ as its mission statement. The maiden 2009 vintage sold out before it was released. Densely planted vines in 12 linked valleys set around a lake create a spectacular terroir. Grapes are picked at night when the autumnal temperature drops, sorted twice by hand and fed by gravity into the vats.

After fermentation, they spend 18-24 months in the barrel and a year in bottle. There’s only one wine: a cabernet-carménère blend with smidgens of syrah and merlot. It’s balanced and elegant with concentrated flavour, fruity but not overly so, spicy but not too much, mineral, complex and with a finish that goes on. And on. If there were any left, a bottle would cost upwards of £60. The estate employs 400 people and is lobbying for Fairtrade certification. High wages and good working conditions are an integral piece of the jigsaw.

Contrast this high-end enterprise with the potteries of Pomaire, 60km west of Santiago, where four brightly painted pots sell for 1,000 pesos (£1.30). This is where city people come for a day out. They eat giant empanadas filled with mince, hard-boiled egg and olives and baked in clay ovens; sopaipillas, maize flour cakes, and kebabs of fruit coated in milk chocolate.

Two tasty, very different tales, one extraordinary country – rapidly developing Chile’s culinary ying and yang. As its economy booms, the deeply ingrained traditions and knowledge of this incredibly diverse population are not just being preserved, they’re actively thriving, boosted by new energy, resources and talent. Southwest South America’s gourmet version of back to the future.