As I woke up the ship was finishing docking in Coquimbo, Chile. Pronounced “ko-kim-bo”, like someone named Kim started a martial art. May two Kims created a fitness craze? No….?
Coquimbo translates to “Place of Calm Waters”, and I certainly felt it when the ship turned into the harbor. Along with the city La Serena, just to the north, both are mostly beach tourist towns. You know what kind of tour you’re having when the guides says, “And now we are passing the local airport.” Really.
However, once we escaped the cities and entered the Elqui Valley the view improved. The higher we drove the more the ecology changed from beach to high desert. By the time we reached our destination we were at 2000 ft (600 m) elevation. Our guide pointed out that the air is so clear in this part of Chile, in addition to a port and airport being close by, that many observatories and near. We could not do an excursion for the ship as they are on un-paved roads and more than 6500 ft (2000 m) high. There was one in the distance as we drove into the valley.
Yeah, a silver dot just doesn’t do it. There are plenty of observatories nearby, if that’s your thing:
Side note: you can notice the higher in elevation we went the more the desert looked like the Arizona hills rather than super-dusty Arica.
Capel is a co-op of Elqui Valley grape growers that focus on pisco. As I’m not a drinker, I had no idea what that meant. Turns out that pisco is distilled wine, and very popular in South America. The welcome center has various types of grapes growing right there, which I thought was a nice touch.
The farms bring their grapes and dump them into a trough where an auger pushes them into the de-stemming machine. The grapes then move to the crusher and the juices are fermented for two weeks. I was surprised by the number of tanks that were in the sun, but our guide told me all the tanks are climate controlled.
After fermentation the wine is then distilled in classic copper tanks.
After about 10 hours of distillation the wine (?) is moved into barrels for aging. If the resulting pisco is for mixed drinks, they spend a few months in large barrels made of local Chilean wood. The pisco made to be consumed without mixer are placed in smaller barrels made of US or French oak. They can age for years.
This facility also hosts bottling equipment, with a capacity of 1700 bottles per hour. Of course, it was not grape season, so we did not get to see any of this in action.
We then jumped on the bus and visited the local town, which is famous for being the home of Gabriela Mistral, who won the 1945 Nobel Prize for Literature. The town was not much, but then our guides (we had four buses here) took us to a local cafe and fed us Chilean snacks. That goes a long way in my book. As a twist, in the S.A.L.T. kitchen we cooked the same snack that afternoon. Stay tuned for a future post.
Always ask for a barrel tasting! Looks fabuous and fun.