Champagne Blend Mencia White Rhone Blend Chile

The sparkling wines of Champagne have been revered by wine drinkers for hundreds of years, and even today they maintain their reputation for excellence of flavor and character, and are consistently associated with quality, decadence, and a cause for celebration. Their unique characteristics are partly due to the careful blending of a small number of selected grape varietals, most commonly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. These grapes, blended in fairly equal quantities, give the wines of Champagne their wonderful flavors and aromas, with the Pinot Noir offering length and backbone, and the Chardonnay varietal giving its acidity and dry, biscuity nature. It isn't unusual to sometimes see Champagne labeled as 'blanc de blanc', meaning it is made using only Chardonnay varietal grapes, or 'blanc de noir', which is made solely with Pinot Noir.

The Rhone region of France has been producing superb quality white blended wines for centuries, and is a region highly respected and esteemed around the world, with plenty of New World countries keen to emulate the styles and techniques displayed by the historic wineries and skilled vintners of the area. The secret to the Rhone's success when it comes to blended white wines is the careful and expert selection of certain grape varietals, which each lend special features to the blended wine and bring balance and harmony to the bottle. Most commonly, blended white Rhone wines feature no more than two grapes of either the Viognier, Rousanne, Marsanne or Grenache Blanc varietals, and are renowned for their exceptional flavors and highly aromatic, floral character.

Chile has a long and rich wine history which dates back to the Spanish conquistadors of the 16th century, who were the first to discover that the wonderful climate and fertile soils of this South American country were ideal for vine cultivation. It has only been in the past forty or fifty years, however, that Chile as a modern wine producing nation has really had an impact on the rest of the world. Generally relatively cheap in price,Whilst being widely regarded as definitively 'New World' as a wine producing country, Chile has actually been cultivating grapevines for wine production for over five hundred years. The Iberian conquistadors first introduced vines to Chile with which to make sacramental wines, and although these were considerably different in everything from flavor, aroma and character to the wines we associate with Chile today, the country has a long and interesting heritage when it comes to this drink. Chilean wine production as we know it first arose in the country in the mid to late 19th century, when wealthy landowners and industrialists first began planting vineyards as a way of adopting some European class and style. They quickly discovered that the hot climate, sloping mountainsides and oceanic winds provided a perfect terroir for quality wines, and many of these original estates remain today in all their grandeur and beauty, still producing the wines which made the country famous.