Maquis Lien Winery
Maquis' old winery, still in use today for storing wine, was built in 1927 by owner an engineer Ignacio Hurtado and was considered revolutionary at the time for the ingenious way to control temperatures during fermentation and it's state of the art French machinery.
In 2002, after several years of refining the management of the vineyards and quality of the grapes the Hurtado Family decided to start building a new winery in Maquis, one that should allow the expression of the characteristics and personality of the grapes in the clearest way possible. The idea was that for a number of stages of the winemaking production process, no machinery would ever replace the quality and care of the job done by a passionate and professional team and so the winery was designed for facilitating an artisinal job where: 16 people could do the selection and hand sorting of the bunches and berries that come from our surrounding Maquis Estate vineyards; 14 people could perform manual pumpovers during fermentation in case we needed the softest tannin extraction; our cellar master would have the time to stand next to the 2 classic vertical hydraulic presses that take three and a half hours for pressing small amounts of grape skins and deliver the most qualitative press wine; 3 people would take care of always keeping the barrels filled with wine and racking it every now and then to allow the wine to breathe and 8 people could hand label and wrap every bottle of wine that comes out of the winery. Designing such an operation was obviously a challenge but together with young Chilean architect Cristián Sáez and his team the new gravity flow and energy saving winery came to life just in time for the 2003 harvest.
The winery building has won some architectural prizes and appeared as a reference in several publications since its inauguration.
Click on the links below for more information about:
The story of Maquis Lien
Viña Maquis winemaking team
Viña Maquis contact information