The day after returning from Easter Island, we rented a car at SCL airport in Santiago and drove 2h15m to the town of Santa Cruz in the Colchagua Valley SSW of Santiago. It’s an easy self-guided side trip from Santiago. I’d chosen an intriguing little hotel located in a family villa tucked behind gates off the main road into Santa Cruz. Behind those unassuming gates, Hotel Boutique Quinta Maria boasts a pretty flower-draped courtyard, covered walks and a swimming pool. The flowers fill the property with their perfume. Breakfast each morning was delivered to our stylishly decorated room on a big tray laden with such treats as eggs from the owner’s chickens, homemade jam from her fruit trees and fresh fruit.
The whole point of this stay was wine tasting and I’d booked us at four wineries, two a day. Santa Cruz is the perfect location with none of the wineries I wanted to visit more than fifteen minutes by Uber from our hotel. (Although we had a rent car, we did not want to drink and drive. Uber worked like a charm and was cheap and readily available each time we wanted it.) Unfortunately, we had the first bad weather of this trip the weekend we spent in Colchagua and rain canceled a horse-drawn carriage ride through vineyards I’d scheduled at the first winery, Viu Manent. On the bright side, the winery substituted a more expensive wine tasting at no additional charge. Although Viu Manent wines were our least favorite of the trip, we did enjoy lunch at their Rayuela restaurant overlooking an equestrian training field and vineyards.
The highlight of our winery visits was Clos Apalta, a truly spectacular architectural feat offering some exceptional wines. The winery building looks like an deconstructed wine barrel from the outside, with the barrel staves splayed and pointing to the sky. A rock garden with “sundial” indicating the seasons of grape growth and harvest sits atop this structure and overlooks the Colchagua Valley with its vineyards, orchards and mountains beyond. Inside, the structure burrows seven stories into a stone hillside. Each floor is carefully and artistically designed to house the gravity-driven wine-making process. A natural spiral stone staircase descending the full seven stories wraps around a Foucault’s pendulum. Large elevators provide an alternate method of ascent and descent. At the very bottom a large, transparent-topped tasting table in the middle of a barrel-filled room lifts to expose two stories of stairs down to the owners private reserves. The whole thing is truly impressive. Clos Apalta is owned by members of the Marnier family that owned Grand Marnier in France and the heritage shows in their excellent wines.
Rain interfered again with a planned picnic on our second day at Viña Montgras outside the nearby town of Palmilla. Plan B turned out to be a delightful fireside indoor picnic. Not bad! Viña Montgras offers picnic baskets filled with hearty steak sandwiches, cheese, cured meats, olives, bottled water, cookies and a bottle of one of their wines. Business was slow on this cloudy, shoulder-season day so we had the winery to ourselves with its pretty courtyard and display of antique wine-making instruments on a lower floor. The staff couldn’t have been nicer and, by the time we finished our picnic, the sun had come out and we could enjoy a bit of their picturesque vineyards.
Our final winery was Viña Montes, neighbor to Clos Apalta. Like Clos Apalta, Viña Montes uses gravity to facilitate its wine making. Approached across a reflecting pool, the main building is sleek and modern utilizing feng shui to put its Asian customers at ease. Huge picture windows in a ground-floor conference room look out over top-rated Fuegos de Apalta restaurant, vineyards and green hills on which alpacas graze. The alpacas are brought in to keep grass down among the vines. We enjoyed the Viña Montes wines, focused heavily on local carmenère grapes, although we really liked their pinot noirs as well.
Practical Info:
Santa Cruz is a small town with a pretty square, a small museum and a casino. The owner of our hotel, Gabriela, recommended several including Rayuela where we ate at Viu Manent. We enjoyed another meal at La Casita de Barreales with its Peruvian cuisine and decor and lovely open courtyard.
The highways between Santiago and the Colchagua Valley are modern and in good shape with views of the snow-capped Andes to the east. On the way back to Santiago, we detoured through scenic rural roads to lunch at a roadside restaurant near Rapel Lake. Those roads were fine as well although we occasionally shared them with slower moving farm vehicles.
September 2025