“…The Kingston Ranch, in the southwest corner of Casablanca, is ten miles inland from the sea. The wind is less fierce; the rolling hills look a lot like the ridges of the Russian River Valley.

‘The coastal range is older than the Andes,’ says Enrique Alliende, who married into the Kingston family and has been involved in developing the vineyards. ‘My mother’s family has a farm in Paradones, as close to the sea, but farther south in Colchagua. There you can see soil like this.’ Where the road is cut up the hill to the winery, there’s a 20 foot wall of that powdery granite. Here, there’s a thinner layer of clay than at Izquierdo’s vineyard. There are also narrow veins of quartz, about the width of the canes on Kingston’s young vines; they run vertically up through the hill, easily fractured by vine roots headed down.

The Kingstons planted their first pinot noir vines in 1998, 24 acres with blocks of three different clones. ‘After that, we started really planting pinot noir,’ Alliende says. Now they have 77 acres in the ground and have plans to develop a new selection of the plant material that consistently creates their top wine (which Alliende describes as a rather troubled massale selection growers call Valdivieso, particularly sensitive to site and to fruit set).

Partnering with Byron Kosuge, a winemaker from California, they started making a small amount of estate wine in 2003. Kosuge now works with Evelyn Vidal, a Chilean he met at MacCrostie in Sonoma, where she had worked a stage in 2003. The wines they made together in 2006 benefited from the new winery they built on site. ‘It’s totally different to have your own facilities,’ Vidal says. ‘This year we only had to move the wine two times to make the blend and to bottle.’

Vidal and Kosuge make two selections of pinot noir. Tobiano, a blend of clonal blocks that matures in 30 percent new oak. Alazan, the top selection, is mostly Valdivieso in 20 percent new oak. Tasted out of barrel, the 2006 Alazan has great intensity of flavor, the firm tannins picking up on the granitic soils, the texture luscious and rich. Tobiano is less earthy, with more delicate red fruit, beautiful both for its color and its length of flavor. As a barrel sample, it’s a remarkably distinctive pinot noir. The challenge, as is often the case in Chile, will be to bottle, and ship that delicate beauty while preserving its charm.

Pinot noir is gaining traction in Chile, with significant players like Morande and Veramonte focused on the variety and Cono Sur building a brand on it. And it’s easy to imagine a young Chilean enologist being seduced by the cool, fresh wines of the 2006 vintage. Driving the dirt roads of the far coast, it’s just as easy to imagine these hills and ridges covered in a patchwork of vines. The first green blocks are already here.