From above, Clos Apalta appears to be one vineyard tucked into the horseshoe-shaped hills of Chile’s Apalta Valley. Spend time with the people who work here, however, and the landscape begins to break apart into dozens of distinct expressions. Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle and her husband, Cyril de Bournet, discovered Apalta in 1994 while searching the world for an exceptional place to make wine. They found century-old vines, granitic hillsides, cooling influences from the Pacific and a landscape whose complexity rewarded the French belief in terroir they brought with them. Today, Technical Director and winemaker Andrea León identifies approximately 17 micro-terroirs within the estate. During harvest, those differences are refined even further into smaller polygons based on soil, vigor, ripening and the conditions of that particular season. By the end of harvest, the cellar may hold around 80 individual wines. That precision helped us understand what makes Clos Apalta memorable. The goal is not to make the vineyard more uniform. It is to understand its differences well enough to protect them, then patiently bring those individual voices together in the final blend, a highly awarded Masterpiece.