2025 Pedro Parra Pais "Vinista", Itata Valley, Chile

Aromatics open floral and high-toned, rose petal, crushed wild strawberry and red currant, with a camphor/menthol lift and a curl of woodsmoke underneath. The palate is light-bodied and driven by acid, with a red-berry and pomegranate core and fine, dusty, faintly rustic tannin that grips without weighing anything down. Finish is perfumed and mineral, that quartz-and-graphite scrape that comes off granite.

From vines around 120 years old, dry-farmed bush vines, hand-harvested, aged in concrete and stainless with roughly 30% whole-bunch fermentation, sourced across two soils that pull in opposite directions: granite at Guarilihue and silty, sandy black basalt at Ñipas. That split is the wine, the granite gives the mineral cut and lift, the basalt gives flesh and a rounder tannin. País was Chile's bulk-jug grape for four centuries; here the guy who maps terroir for the best addresses in the world treats it as a serious terroir vehicle