For much of its history, the Chilean export wine industry has been dominated by big companies that farmed in the huge Central Valley region, which stretches 250 miles south of Santiago and includes well-known river valleys like Maipo, Maule and Rapel.

In recent years, interest has been growing in cooler regions, which have long histories of growing grapes for cheaper wines sold domestically.

Aside from the climates, what caught the eyes of ambitious winemakers were old vineyards on granite soils. Modern vineyards are generally arranged on wire trellises in neat rows, making automated agriculture easy, but these old vines were trained using an older method of shaping them into free-standing, goblet-like shapes resembling bushes.

These vineyards comprised grapes grown in Chile long before international varieties like cabernet sauvignon came to dominate the export market. They include red grapes like cinsault, carignan and pais, known in the United States as mission. Most of them are farmed without irrigation, and most are grown on their own roots, unlike 99 percent of the world’s commercial grapevines, which are grafted onto American rootstocks that are immune to the phylloxera aphid.