Francisco Baettig is renowned in the Chilean wine world for his work with Viña Errázuriz where his changes in the vineyard and the cellars vaulted the winery to one of the great wineries of Chile. Baettig spent much of his winemaking career in the north but, when he set about making his own estate, he wondered if his birthplace might be better suited to the Burgundian varietals that he sought to grow. Malleco is where he planted his vines, a region rifted with tectonic joints and Andean volcanoes. As a result, the bedrock and gravels come from volcanoes and the rich loam arises from the rich biodiversity of ecosystems that have lived over the old eruptions for eons. Far to the south, the region benefits the growth of pinot noir and chardonnay with its low UV and cool night temperatures. Today the winery is 9 hectares of pinot noir and 6.4 hectares of chardonnay. The farming is manual with no chemical inputs. The harvest is all by hand. The fermentations are all indigenous and the wines age in French oak barrels.

Los Primos comes from chardonnay vines on red clay loam and volcanic bedrock at 250 meters. The grapes are hand harvested and whole-cluster pressed before fermenting with natural yeasts and aging in 38% new French oak barrels. This wine routinely secures extremely high scores from critics. And one can see why—all purity and symmetry, every angle and silk and flesh hanging at the most ideal balance against each other, all of it undergirded by a mineral plinth like a landform.

98 points with Robert Parker and James Suckling