Chill Out with a Holiday to Chile
We know you appreciate delicious food and fine wines. A good wine gives you a flavour of the far off region where it was made with a real sense of place and character. Good wine brings a piece of the vineyard into your own home but there is no better way to boost your enjoyment than experiencing the sights, sounds and flavours of your favourite wine region in the flesh. There are dozens of wine tasting holiday packages available, but most seems to be commercial tourist traps that rush you through the terroir in air conditioned detachment.
We prefer the more intimate, active holidays that give the space and time to walk through a wine region, drinking in the atmosphere and sampling the local food as well as tasting the wines. Nowhere in the world rewards this more intimate approach than Chile. The locals say that when God finished making the world, he put all the beautiful and spectacular bits he had left, like mountains, lakes, waterfalls, deserts and glaciers into one place. Chile is indeed a country blessed with a unique geography is the ideal location for walking holidays as you only have to go a very short distance to witness dramatic changes in scenery and climate.
It’s long and thin with the high Andes to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west and a climate moderated by the cool Humbolt Current rising up from Antarctica. There’s more variety in soils and climates in the relatively short distance from east to west than there is north to south. The character of a Chilean wine is mainly influenced by its proximity to the Andes or the Pacific and this range of terroir offers ideal conditions for a number of grape varieties including Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Riesling Viognier, Pinot Noir, Merlot, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and the Carmenere varietal (a rich red) which is unique to Chile. Chile was never affected by the 19th century phylloxera epidemic which cut swathes through European vineyards, so has kept its precious old growth vines introduced by the Spanish colonists of the 16th century.
Chile Holidays will introduce you to this superb range of wine and give you a real taste of Chilean cuisine. There’s a tremendous diversity of seafood thanks to 4,270 km of coastline and other signature Chilean dishes include Empanada de Pino, a type of pastie filled with diced meat, onions, olive, raisins and hard-boiled egg. Curanto en Hoyo is a typical dish from the south of Chile prepared by heating fish, seafood, potatoes, meat and bread over red hot rocks then wrapping in big leaves and burying in the ground so that it slowly cooks over a number of hours.

