Montes Alpha Cabernet Sauvignon 2021

Chile is a region that has done a particularly good job in the last 10-15 years, announcing themselves as a serious player on the international scene. Big named wine producers from Europe and the U.S. took notice and invested heavily in Chile, including Spain’s Miguel Torres and France’s Lafite-Rothschild, Mouton-Rothschild, Cos d’Éstournel and Robert Mondavi amongst others.

With piles of money being poured into Chile, some of these high-end wines are even considered to be the best in the world. Among these $$$ collectors bottles, Clos Apalta, Lapostelle, Viñedo Chadwick and Viña Montes’ Purple Angel Carmenere are considered amongst the top bottlings anywhere, let alone just the Southern Hemisphere.

But Vina Montes doesn’t just make arguably the world’s best Carmenere in a $150/bottle. They also make outrageously good Cabernet and those prices are still very affordable. In fact, I’d say that this Cabernet Sauvignon that I just had for him is EASILY better than 95% of the under $30 California Cabernet bottlings. It’s absolutely killer.

The winery is on the forefront of technology and innovation. If you don’t believe me, consider this: Montes founder and winemaker Aurelio Montes uses music in the production process, playing monastic chants to help mature his wine casks in the barrel room. The man is so obsessed with music’s impact on wine that he even commissioned a study with 250 adults on the Heriot-Watt University campus in Edinburgh to determine what music genre brought out the best expression of the wine. If you’re wondering, the study found that when powerful music such as ‘O Fortuna from Orff’s Carmina Burana is playing, the Montes Alpha Cabernet was perceived as being 60% richer and more robust than when there was no music playing at all!