Santa Rita is one of the few wineries whose entry-level red is named after a war. Its "120" bottling refers to a night in 1814, when 120 soldiers fighting for Chilean independence are said to have sheltered in the estate's cellars. It is a good story, and the winery has leaned on it for more than a century, but the reason Santa Rita matters to anyone holding a glass is narrower and more useful: it helped prove what Maipo Valley Cabernet could be.
Founded in 1880 by Domingo Fernández Concha, the estate sits just south of Santiago in Maipo, the warm, classic valley that became Chile's answer to Bordeaux. The legend of the soldiers and the woman who hid them, Doña Paula Jaraquemada, still anchors the visit: the grand nineteenth-century house is now a hotel, and a restaurant carries her name. None of that, though, is in the bottle.
Maipo Valley
What is in the bottle is Cabernet Sauvignon, the grape behind more of Santa Rita's range than any other. Maipo's heat ripens it fully while cold air spilling off the Andes at night keeps the acidity firm, and the estate's top Cabernet, Casa Real, is the wine that made the case. Critics have pushed it to 97 points, the kind of score that helped turn Maipo from a bulk valley into a serious one. It is a red built to age rather than to drink on release.
Look past the flagship and the more telling bottles are often the ones playing Chile's own hand instead of Bordeaux's, like the Floresta Carménère, made from the grape Chile rescued from obscurity. Santa Rita now sits inside the Claro group and owns Viña Carmen next door and Doña Paula across the Andes in Argentina, so the template it proved in Maipo has travelled. The war story gets you through the gate; the Cabernet is why you stay.
