2021 Pedro Parra y Familia 'Vinista' Pais
Region: Itata Valley, Chile
Grape: Pais
Culinary Suggestions: Grilled Meats, Meat Balls, Chorizo
Practices: Sustainable
About
Pedro Parra y Familia Wines is a project that was created by a man that is very serious about ‘Terroir’. Pedro has a master’s degree in precision agriculture and earned a Ph.D. for his work with terroir from the Paris Center of Agriculture.
Parra had dreamt about making his own wine for many years whilst working as a Terroir Consultant, but it is not until 2013 he released his first commercial vintage. Making wines from the Itata region, Southern Chile, with old vine Cinsault and Pais planted on the granitic soils of the Coastal mountain range. Pedro is a true passionate of this area, in which he calls home, and is extremely grateful of the absence of industrialised wineries, other popular grape varieties and forced irrigation, growing high yielding vineyards.
As a consultant, Pedro Parra works with some major players of the wine world, that include Comando G (Gredos), Jean-Marc Roulot (Meursault), Liger Belair (Vosne-Romanee), Marco Marengo (Barolo), Altos las Hormigas (Mendoza) and Chapter 24 (Oregon) to name a few.
Pedro speaks of 2016 being a turning point in his winemaking career. This is where and when he realises that after many years of working with some of the great wine regions of the world, focusing on minerality, freshness, the pursuit of red fruit characteristics and complexity with minimal oak influence, will be the future motivation of Pedro Parra y Familia Wines.
We are honoured to get our hands on his higher tier Cinsault’s, which are extremely terroir specific and very small production per cuvee. Coming from 3 different sites he calls ‘cru’s’, expressing various levels of minerality vs fruit power depending on soil depth. Creating great wines and a great exercise to taste all 3, side by side.
Overall, Pedro wants his wines to deliver something Chile has never seen before, steering away from hearty styles, bringing wines from the Southern corner with ‘electricity and tension’ as he likes to say. - Importer Note
Tasting Notes
The 2021 Vinista was produced with País grapes from four ancient vineyards, two with volcanic soils in Ñipas and two on granite from Guarilihue. The grapes fermented slowly with their natural yeasts with 100% full clusters, and the wine matured in oak and concrete vats for 11 months. There is something in common with the Hub here; it has a more evolved color and a more evolved nose, very much à la Rayas, with iron and blood, cherries in liqueur and brick dust. This comes from a warmer place but with more soil, half of it basalt, and the granite from Ñipas is very different from the one from Guarilihue; here, there is fine quartz and lots of silt, which gives more ripeness and Italian tannins. This is outstanding. It's the finest Vinista to date. 18,000 bottles produced. It was bottled in February 2021.
93 points - Luis Gutierrez, Wine Advocate April 2023
Drink: 2022 - 2026