Creation Wines really pulled out the stops for this tasting, with five vintages of Concha y Toro’s flagship wine, DON MELCHOR. The oldest was an amazingly youthful 1988, the second vintage.

This wine showed with just a trace of tertiary aromas, but the fruit was still bright and the fine tannins were silky smooth. Even so, my favorite is still the 2010, which though younger is much more approachable than the 2005.

We had the honor once again to meet Enrique Tirado Santelices, the chief winemaker for Don Melchor and hear him explain this iconic vineyard, Puente Alto.

To me the most amazing statistic he cited was the radical diurnal variation around harvest time — nearly 20 degrees difference between day and nighttime temperatures.

Enrique is at once wonderfully knowledgeable and self-effacing, and I sense he is sincere when he invites us all to visit him in Chile. Watch out. One day we will really go.