Secano Interior and Guarilihue Alto, Itata, Chile

Carter Mollenhauer

Carter Maulenhauer is a boutique winery owned by Karine and her husband, Edgar Mollenhauer. They are known for their commitment to producing high-quality wines that reflect the unique terroir of the Itata region and they are particularly focused on working with traditional Chilean grape varieties such as Pais and Cinsault.

“Wine is made by and for the people. We are the fourth element of terroir next to the vines, the soil, and the climate. The permanent aspect of our work is the quality of the wine, the consequent reputation of a place and the benefit to its people.

Without the human aspect, there is no terroir, and if Chile wants to make the world fall in love with its wines, we must go beyond just making good and correct wines. We must worry about transferring the character of the place and the people to the bottle, the interpretation of the territories must focus on that from my point of view. Only in this way will we make unique and unrepeatable wines that capture the attention of connoisseurs.

ltata lives an extraordinary awakening, which revalue the honesty and humanity of wine. An awakening that, like the "Aurora" (dawn) and the song of its birds, represents the beginning of each day. This wine renews our commitment to this ancient land, its fruits and with those who work it.

We decided to start as a winery, set up the kitchen with everything we wanted to make wine as we wanted and buy the grapes. Today we make the wines that best represent us, with total freedom, all in common agreement with the producers, establishing long-term relationships with them, paying more than worthy prices, so that the entire chain prospers. Since we create a wine, the plot of origin does not change, it is always the same for each label. They are "vinos de lugar" or "terroir wines". And although we are not the owners of these vineyards, we are in love and truly committed to each one of them. In 2020 we began the geological study to fully understand the qualitative potential of each one, which began to be reflected in the wines of the 2021 harvest. All the grapes are harvested by hand and taken to our winery in Maule. Each vinification lot represents a sector defined by geological aspects, and there may be up to three different vinifications from a one-hectare parcel. All these grapes arrive identified at the winery, and each sector is elaborated separately. All the lots are rigorously manually selected to extract immature grapes, green remains, etc., and as appropriate, we will fill our tanks with foot-trodden grapes or we will manually de-stem them in our stainless steel "zaranda", depending on the vinification decision of each plot. For most of the cases, we do a combination of foot-trodden whole bunch with a proportion of destemmed bunches. All wines go through spontaneous fermentation with indigenous yeast since our beginnings in 2014.” Edgar Mollenhauer.