A relaxing, enjoyable stay in Chilean vineyards can turn an excellent trip into something extraordinary. In my 20 years in Chile – many spent working in the travel industry – I’ve had the opportunity to explore vineyards from north to south, and one winery hotel truly stands apart: The Clos Apalta Residence.
What makes Apalta’s Residence stand out is how it combines the beauty of the Chilean countryside with excellence in winemaking and cuisine as well as its spacious, comfortable, and well-thought-out accommodations, which, altogether, make for an unforgettable experience. It’s not the first result that Google pulls up, but if you are coming to Chile and love great food and wine, you have to consider it.
At Knowmad, we’ve been including stays in the original casitas at this winery hotel for years. But with the addition of six spacious villas to build on its offer, on my recent visit, I set out with the mission to experience these new spaces and to update our understanding of how to work this into our custom trips to Chile.
How to fit it into a trip
In order to arrive at this Chilean vineyards hotel, you’ll drive from the Santiago airport two and a half hours south, so it fits in nicely with time spent in the capital. You could certainly start your trip here, but it’s a style of property and experience that can fit very nicely at the end of a trip too. If you are heading to Patagonia and flying out of Santiago, you can either transfer straight out to the property after an afternoon arrival at the airport, or take a night or two in Santiago and then make the trip south for a storybook end to an amazing adventure.
The property
The Residence is on the Clos Apalta vineyard, which occupies a corner of the Apalta Valley, a sub-growing region that sits adjacent to the Colchagua Valley.
Clos Apalta is the flagship wine of Lapostolle, a wine and spirits maker founded in 1994 by Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle and her husband, Cyril de Bournet. Alexandra is the great-granddaughter of Louis-Alexandre Marnier Lapostolle, who created the renowned French liqueur Grand Marnier.
The owners chose Chile due to its unique conditions for making wine and they were not wrong. Clos Apalta has won numerous awards and accolades. Its 2005 vintage was ranked at the #1 spot of Wine Spectator’s “Top 100 Wines” list in 2008 – the first and only time a Chilean wine has achieved this recognition to date. Many of its vintages have received outstanding scores from top wine critics, including the 2014 and 2017 vintages, which earned perfect 100 point scores from James Suckling.
These are the wines I was poured to pair with their delicious and well-prepared food. I also got to sample vintages going back up to 24 years, but that’s not all that made my stay special.
The project started as a guest house for the owners to stay in when visiting from Europe, and then grew to four “casitas” for their friends or family, business contacts, and eventually guests from outside the family and business. And now, these accommodations have been complemented by the addition of 6 villas which have even more spacious dwellings. After staying here for a couple of nights, I simply did not want to leave, and it’s the perfect space to share for a couple.
You can tell that the owners have made every effort to maintain this feeling of family hospitality over that of a luxury resort, and they encourage visitors to leave their time at the Residence a bit more unstructured until they arrive. Privacy and seclusion was also an important consideration: each casita and villa is off on its own in the native forest.
The food, cellar, and activities
At the heart of the experience at Clos Apalta Residence, accompanying their amazing wines, is the food. The kitchen is run by the family chef Leonal Diaz, who led us on a market visit during my stay. He’s friendly and exact, and very happy to share and discuss all the work that goes on behind the scenes in creating his menus.
This is not a restaurant with a printed menu per se. Each meal is something different; guests arrive to find a printed menu with their name, specific to each person, and tailored to any dietary preferences or restrictions they might have. Ideally, you’ll want to let the chef do what he does best. You won’t regret it.
The food has some of the touches one would expect from a French-owned establishment. Foie gras and pâté are present, but the owners also have a fondness for Asian cuisine, so you’ll find ingredients like rice noodles or other similar touches throughout the dishes. Of course, the kitchen does not ignore its Chilean roots, and there are always some great ingredients sourced locally: abalone, lamb, king crab, and salmon, just to name a few of the local delicacies that can show up on a dish.
With all the great things going on in the Clos Apalta Residence, it would be understandable to forget about the cellar, but the guided visit that is included in all stays still stands out as one of the major highlights from my time there.
It’s not until you start to descend into the cellar, however, that you realize just how special this winery is. The first glimpse once inside is a spiraling staircase leading you seven floors down into the hill. It’s a massive and deep structure, with the exposed rock of the earth in full view. The first couple of floors down are for the production and fermenting of the wine with steel tanks. Continue further and you get to the large oak casks; below that, the barrel room for further aging; and, finally, an incredible library of the winery’s past vintages going back to its creation.
Even though my visit was mainly focused on great food and wine, I still love to get out and explore the outdoors, and the options at the Residence give you some great ways to be active during your visit. The property includes a ridge of hills that form the edge of the Apalta Valley, and these are fantastic for a hike. The forests are all native, so the vegetation is of moderate height but still thick and full of all sorts of birds, and a hike here also gives you views of the surrounding area and the vineyard at its floor.
Bicycles are also provided, and if the steep trails are too much, there are flat roads that take you through the grape vines for a picturesque vineyard memory.
Beyond the available active excursions, you can enjoy a cocktail class offered in the evenings, and the chef will also give cooking demonstrations where guests can participate as they like or just hop on as an observer and willing taste-tester. On Saturdays, there is a local market where guests can accompany the chef on one of his buying outings.
The Colchagua Valley does offer other attractions, especially more vineyards. If interested in a cultural outing, one of the region’s key figures, Carlos Cardoen, has a museum in the nearby town of Santa Cruz, and Residence guests can arrange a visit there. His collection is vast and very well displayed: everything from pre-Columbian objects, relics, and military collectables to antique race cars and some of the items used by Chile’s rescued 33 miners are all on display here.
For guests staying two nights or more, the vineyard can, upon request, arrange visits to other vineyards. To be completely honest, however, this is also a property that when you arrive, you might not want to leave, so these sort of decisions are best made once there, rather than ahead of time.
I could dedicate plenty more words to what makes the experience at Clos Apalta so special and unique and why it’s my top luxury Chilean wine stay, although there is still something indescribable about what you walk away with at the end of a stay there. What stands out for me is the sensations of enjoying simple, but deliciously prepared food and pairing it with some of the best wines you can find anywhere, not just in Chile. I’ll also remember the warmth of the people involved, the night sky from the property, and the sun hitting the splash pool of the secluded villa. It’s a memory that you can feel, and one I would definitely encourage you to pursue as well—one that lingers, much like the beauty of Chilean vineyards.
It is always Knowmad’s goal that our travelers feel prepared for and excited about their adventure to Chile and South America. If you have any questions we can help answer, or if you’d like to discuss planning your own adventure to Chile, give one of our Trip Specialists a call today at at 612-315-2894, or email us at [email protected] to begin planning your personalized Chile itinerary.
Colin is a Trip Specialist based in Santiago, Chile and Knowmad Adventures is a South American travel company that crafts active, authentic and sustainable experiences for the independent traveler. A native Iowan, Colin has been a Santiago resident since 2004, and exploring Chile’s wine country has been one of his favorite ways to experience Chile over the years.
