Vina Siegel
Colchagua
Valley
(Chile)
The Estate
Alberto
Siegel was born in Santiago in 1946, third generation
in Chile of an Austrian family. His grandfather was an
Austrian architect that built some very important and
traditional buildings in downtown Santiago, at the beginning of the 20th century. Among those
buildings, the one of the Chilean Federal Reserve.
His
father, Don Germán, was a viticulturist that spent most of his
career in charge of Viña San Pedro’s vineyards near the town of
Molina, 140 miles south of Santiago. There Alberto grew up,
literally in the middle of the vines. It was not a surprise then,
that he decided to study Agronomy in the Universidad Católica, in
Santiago. And not only that, he specialized in winemaking.
After
finishing High School, he spent a year working in some wineries in
Germany and when he came back in 1971, he joined the German
company Bayer. His job then was to sell fertilisers to farm owners
in the Colchagua area, 100 miles south of Santiago. This job
allowed him to know almost every land owner, of which most where
grape growers and wine producers.
click here to see Slideshow
Siegel family
Alberto Siegel (center), his father (left),
and the winemaker Nicolas Oyarzun (right)
A
few years later and as a natural consequence, he started to act as
wine and grape broker, selling the production of small owners to
the big Chilean wineries. He established Sociedad La Laguna.
He
soon became the most important Chilean broker in this field,
position that he holds today by far. There is hardly any Chilean
person or Company involved in the wine business that has not dealt
with Alberto Siegel at least once.
In
parallel, and together with his father, Alberto founded Viña
Siegel in 1980. They started planting vineyards in Colchagua and
building the Winery in Santa Cruz. When Don Germán died in 1998,
Alberto became sole owner together with his family. At the
begining, Viña Siegel only sold bulk wines to the biggest Chilean
wineries, like Concha y Toro, San Pedro and Santa Rita. In 1997,
Alberto decided to enter the
bottled wines business, and made the necessary investments
to go ahead with this project. Now, the Winery has a capacity of 2
million gallons and the Company owns over 1,300 acres of vineyards
in Colchagua.
New technology
For the last 15 years, the wine cellar was used exclusively
for producing wines to be sold in bulk. It has recently been
modernized and currently has a capacity of 7,500,000 liters. It
uses such state of the art technology as vertical pneumatic
presses, vacuum filters, and stainless steel tanks with total
temperature control, for both cooling and heating. The Siegel
Winery is a family operation, with Alberto Siegel as chairman and
Chief winemaker. The winery has two consultants in enological
matters.
The winery
The Vineyard
The
Siegel Winery owns a total of some 450 hectares in the Colchagua
Valley. The varieties of grapes grown are Cabernet Sauvignon,
Merlot, Carmenere, Syrah, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, with
other new varieties increasingly in demand in the different
markets soon to be added. In the last few years this winery¹s
business orientation has taken a new turn with the decision to
produce and market its own wines. The winery produces a range of
varietal wines, along with reserve wines that highlight the
quality of the grapevines born in this valley. They are products
with world-class quality, for international distribution and
consumption.
The
Colchagua Valley is truly a synthesis of the country’s way of
life and wine has been produced here since time out of mind. This
area, which has deservedly been raised to the category of estate
bottling in wine making, has maintained its prestige due to the
great quality of its wines. One of its noted symbols is its high
quality Cabernet Sauvignons, and its red wines in general. Its
variety of soils and climatic variations, some warmer, some
cooler, have given the region innumerable attributes for grapevine
cultivation.
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The
wines |
