Pisco pride in the Elqui Valley

Vicuña, Valle de Elqui
5-8 June 2014

With our jobs at the preschool freshly wrapped up, we packed our not-quite-so-enormous-as-heading-home bags and boarded the bus north for the other half of our bookend tour of Chile (we went south the first week we arrived). First stop: the Elqui Valley (Valle de Elqui), home of many avocado and fruit groves, as well as many, many vineyards, useful for the making of wine and pisco. If you've never heard of pisco (I hadn't before we came), it is a liqueur (technically a brandy? maybe?) made from distilled grapes, and it is the official national drink of both Chile and Peru. If you want to ruffle a few plumas, go to either country and imply that the other one is the true original home of pisco. Watching that particular border battle play out is good for at least a few minutes of free entertainment.

Besides producing lots of grapes and stuff, the Elqui Valley is pretty and nice to visit. 

See what I mean?

We took a tour of the area that included the Fundo Los Nichos pisquera, the oldest active pisco distillery in the country. They still do things pretty old-school and small-scale, relying on their carefully-maintained tourist-friendly quaintness to pay the bills.

...not quite this old school; here's some retired historic equipment

wood-heated boiler...or heater...or whatever you put grape juice in
during the distilling process.

The bubbling nectar of pre-pisco

Early stages in the barrels, with a little exhaust port in a bottle.

Barrels in dark corridors

Here's where we come to the "nichos" mentioned in the name. That's nichos, not nachos. Sorry, nacho lovers. But this is fun and delicious too!

One of the early family member/owners, Don Rigoberto, would host a drinking, gaming, poetry, drinking, philosophy, and drinking club (there was a lot of drinking) for his friends. They would sit in this corner of the pisquera, drinking, surrounded by little niches filled with bottles of pisco.

Many of the niches have little rhyming dedications posted over them. Apparently, whichever of the club members got the most drop-dead drunk each year was "buried" in a niche in the form of pisco, and eulogized in the form of droll poetry.

This one's for a dentist. A drunken, philosophical dentist.

 

Later in the week, we took a tour of the Capel plant. Once you discover that pisco exists and you try to find some, this is the brand you will find, and this is the largest facility they have.

No wood fires here...

...but they do use "oak add-in cubes"
somewhere in the process.

Big tanks-o-pisco

Area de embotellacion: Industry, working for you and your beverage!

I don't mean to knock Capel simply for being big, and they do make a fine product. It just made quite a contrast with Los Nichos.

Also, Los Nichos did not mark any step of their process with a skull and crossbones:

No! Don't drink the pisco from THESE grapes!!

Once you have obtained a bottle of pisco you may ask, what do I do with it?  The answer is almost always: make a pisco sour. It is both my goal and Kat's to perfect the pisco sour this summer, because man, are they tasty. Our pre-trip attempt to make one tasted okay-ish, but properly made by a bartender in the town where they make pisco, it is a zingy, tasty thing of cocktail beauty. I eagerly await an email from local informants.

For the record, we did see other things besides pisco, but I will save dour-faced Nobel Prize winners for another post.