Casablanca Wine Tours | Cool Climate, Cool Wineries
You can enjoy one of our Casablanca wine tours from the Chilean capital but we also highly recommend sleeping among the vines for a night or two for maximum decompression. Another interesting option is to have a couple of nights in the vibrant port city of Valparaiso, very close to the Casablanca Valley in a wine-themed hotel. This means that when you are not sipping at a vineyard you can explore and go photo-crazy in the bohemian, street art explosion that is “Valpo”, and ride the funicular railways of this quirky city.
Staying in Santiago and making day trips is not an issue, however. Driving out to the Casablanca wine region takes around an hour and 15 minutes so there and back in a day is comfortable. But we think given the range of great wineries in Casablanca you need two days for the region. So two separate day trips, or stay overnight locally.
Let’s assume you only have the one day though; what can be done? Below is a sample itinerary from our recent recce trip which we know works very nicely.
After a pickup after breakfast at around 09.30 from your hotel in Vitacura or Las Condes, Santiago we will drive you out to Casablanca. Around 11 am we will have you among the vines at Villard Fine Wines where you will enjoy an intimate, family-feel experience. Alejandra will greet us with a glass to get the juices flowing and take us on a tour of the vineyards to learn something about training methods, leaf shape, grape and bunch characteristics, etc. Some of the vineyards at Villard are very steep, with certain plot angles being suited to certain varieties. After walking the vines we will enjoy another glass in the winery production area. A full description of the process will be given, if you have more technical questions then feel free to ask.
We will then settle down for a couple more tastings in the lovely wine bar or terrace with great views over the vines. A cheese and snacks board will keep you going until we get to lunch mid-afternoon. Charles Villard may be on hand to help show you around his impressive setup and may join you while you taste some of his creations. You can see him below pictured with us, when we visited he was very enthusiastic about his low intervention wines, we took some away and the non-filtered nature of the wines is very evident. We will let you know how they taste at some stage.
After spending some quality time at Villard our next visit will be a shorter one, but no less interesting nor tasty. We will drive around 25 minutes to the other side of Casablanca town to the Kingston Family Vineyards. You will enjoy the fantastic views of the valley while you indulge in a premium tasting of the great wine Kingston creates, and hear the story of the owner family’s 100-year journey to get to this point. This the most “boutique” of the three wineries we will visit today with perhaps a quarter of the production of the last winery, where we will also have lunch. After Kingston, it is a 10-minute hop to arrive at Casas del Bosque, our last stop today. By this time in the mid-afternoon, you will be hungry so we will point you straight at your tables on the lovely patio.
With the owner, winemaker, and tourism manager at Villard Fine Wines in Casablanca
Enjoy a great lunch with a Casas del Bosque wine tasting alongside your food, order a little more of what you like to keep you going if you wish. After eating we will have the chance to look around the winery, visit the wine shop and then relax a while until it is time to head back to Santiago or your hotel in Casablanca or Valparaiso. You will most likely snooze on this last part of the journey!
If you stay over, where will it be?
The Matetic winery hotel is our favorite place to stay if you choose a vineyard location. You can see in the video below that it is a stunning place and you will have more time in the countryside if you don’t have to drive back to Santiago each evening. Obviously, the hotel is quite exclusive and has a price tag to match, but you should spoil yourselves sometimes, right?
There are other options for the Casablanca area, in a range of budget levels plus a couple of notable places to stay in Valparaiso. Please ask us for details.
Cool Wines and Cool Styling
There are a large number of options to add to the three mentioned in our sample program above, and we can blend them in a logical order. We will make sure you get a full range of experiences to fit with your travel style and wishes. We can add active and participatory experiences such as cooking classes and vineyard bicycle rides if you wish.
Veramonte, Emiliana, William Cole, La Recova, Indomita plus a number of other wineries are all clustered together around the small town of Casablanca. We can visit almost all of them on our Casablanca wine tours with a prior arrangement, so if you have one on your list already just let us know. Whichever winery you visit the cooling effects of ocean breezes and mist in this region will be sensed in the glass and many well-established winemakers from warmer regions produce grapes here to develop specific wines with this terroir. Some of these wines you may be able to get at home, some you might want to take in your suitcase.
