One thing that doesn’t change from university to university is balancing a schedule between school, sleep and fun.
Though I am a study abroad student and am currently taking classes, hence the “study” abroad part, I’m also in a beautiful new country with lots to see.
So finding that balance has been an interesting ?journey.
I thought registering for classes at one university was hard until I had to register for classes at three. That was fun.
Now that registration is over, I’ve had ample amounts of time to explore my new home.
Last weekend, some friends and I took a small trip to Viña Concha y Toro, home to the “Casillero del Diablo,” or “Devil’s Chamber,” where hundreds of barrels of wine are stored for aging.
Concha y Toro is one of Latin America’s largest wine producers and is spread throughout major wine regions in Chile. We visited the headquarters in Santiago.
The vineyard was founded by Don Melchor and his wife, Emiliana Subercaseaux, in 1883.
Though the vineyard began with only a few grape varieties brought from the Bordeaux region in France, it now is home to several different grapes, which produce different wines.
The winery is most famous for its red wine varieties, including Cabernet Sauvignon and Carmenere.
Our tour lasted for an hour, and our guide took us from place to place explaining the depth of the beauty we encountered at the winery.
Grape vines stretched for miles. They were empty of course, as it is currently winter here, but signs located at the head of the vines told us what types of wines the grapes produced.
When our guide took us to the main establishment, we tried three different wines.
One of the wines we were able to taste was a Carmenere, called the Gran Reserva. The wine tasted very smooth with various hints of berry.
To get flavors such as strawberry, blueberry, etc., into the wine, our guide told us the flavors were smoked into the giant wood barrels in which the wine is stored for months before bottling to infuse the flavors.
Following our visit to the winery, we ate at a local Chilean restaurant.
The huge yellow building that housed the restaurant was styled to appear more as a comfortable home that most visitors pass by since they are enticed by eateries located closer to the winery itself.
For an appetizer, I got local Chilean olives, something for which the region is well known. Decorated with various herbs, the initial bite was slightly bitter but morphed into a strong, yet smooth finishing taste.
Some of our group ordered “Pollo del Diablo,” or “Devil’s Chicken,” a moist piece of breast meat cooked in local Chilean spices, which tinted the chicken an unusual red color.
The chicken was accompanied by a popular local sauce, ají. While somewhat similar in taste to sriracha, ají boasts a slightly spicier tang.
The rest of the group ordered a traditional Chilean dish, choclo, a type of corn pie. Its name is based on the Quechan word for “tender corn,” or “new corn.”
The top part of the dish is a sweet corn paste and the inside contains “pino” a popular Chilean filling also used for empanadas.
Pino contains beef, onions and spices and is placed in the bottom of the choclo dish along with olives, slices of hard-boiled eggs and ?raisins.
The taste of the dish is an interesting combination of sweet and salty, as the corn paste is extremely sweet and the pino is salty and contains the flavors of several different spices.
With full stomachs and content demeanors, we hopped on the bus back to the metro station, where we all went our separate ways home, most of us carting bottles of Carmenere, a wine that was too delicious for me.
Now that I’ve had a small taste of wine in Chile, I’m already in the process of planning visits to major wineries in the central regions, Casablanca Valley and Colchagua Valley.
Thankfully, we have some days off in September for those trips, because the balance of school, sleep and fun does have to be maintained.
Though classes take up most of my week, I am left with a three-day weekend for my exploring Chile shenanigans.
An exploration I’ve barely begun and am thoroughly excited to continue.
makholla@indiana.edu
