País

País is the grape the Spanish brought to the Americas, and it has a claim to being the most historically significant variety in the New World. Carried from the Canary Islands by missionaries in the sixteenth century, it became the founding vine of viticulture in Chile, Peru, Argentina and Mexico, and it reached California as the Mission grape, planted at the Franciscan missions from the eighteenth century.

In Chile it was the most planted variety until the 1990s, grown in the dry-farmed south around Maule, Itata and Bío-Bío, much of it as ungrafted bush vines well over a century old. It was regarded as worthless — sold for bulk wine and pipeño, the rough local drink — and enormous areas were pulled out in favour of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot.

Its rehabilitation has been one of the more interesting stories in South American wine. A generation of producers, some of them working with growers who had never sold to a winery, began making serious País: pale, light-bodied and translucent, with sour cherry, redcurrant, earth and a dusty, savoury, faintly rustic character. Acidity is high and tannin is light and grainy.

Handled with the same care given to Gamay or Cinsault — whole bunches, gentle extraction, no new oak — it makes a genuinely good wine, and the old dry-farmed vineyards give it a concentration the yields alone would not suggest.

In the Canary Islands, as Listán Prieto, it survives on volcanic soils that phylloxera never reached.