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My wife, Rosemarie, and I were riding in a horse-drawn wagon through one of the oldest vineyards in Chile. It was March, late summer here in the Maipo Valley south of Santiago. Snow was melting in the Andes, and in the fields of Viña Santa Rita, the vines were heavy with clusters of grapes.

Our driver sang softly in Spanish to his two white horses, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. We were on our way to see Santa Rita's state-of-the-art winery and 200-year-old wine cellar, a national landmark.

We were on a wine tour, Chilean-style, where tourists can get an intimate look at the modern process of winemaking as well as a taste of the romance of an era more than 200 years gone, when wealthy landowners first began to raise European wine grapes as a hobby.

My fascination with winemaking has family roots. It began in Waterbury, Conn., where every fall my grandfather and other Italian immigrants went out to their backyards and ran a couple of tons of grapes through hand-cranked wooden crushers. My grandfather's unfiltered Zinfandel was aged in old whiskey barrels and served in shot glasses alongside my grandmother's homemade macaroni and sauce.

Three decades later, in the 1990s, I wrote about home winemakers in south Philadelphia who showed me how they made their row-house reds from California grapes. I decided I had to give it a try.

I got hooked. It's all so earthy: the cold, sweet grapes, the crystal-clear juice flowing from the wine press, the oak barrels stained purple.

For the last dozen years, I've made my own wine. I've also become fascinated with vineyards. Chile was alluring because it has been described as the Garden of Eden for wine grapes.

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Tours and tastes

We had been touring Chilean wineries for two weeks, enjoying an impressive run of Cabernet Sauvignons that began on the plane ride from Miami. Our first winery was Viña Cousiño-Macul, in the capital of Santiago. Cousiño was founded in the mid-1800s and became one of Chile's first wine exporters.

We descended a dark stairway lighted with candles and walked through a meandering tunnel lined with barrels. French architects built the cellar in 1872. At the end, a padlocked, 10-foot-high iron gate was covered with dust and spider webs. Ancient wood shelves and racks held the founding family's private reserve. The bottles, dating from 1927, tilted downward, and the fluted bottoms were almost completely filled with dust. "I don't have the key," the tour guide said.

In the fields of Concha y Toro, another giant winery in Pirque, just south of Santiago, we tasted tiny, blushing-blue Cabernet Sauvignon grapes with thick, chewy skins and sweet squirts of juice. Each row of grapes was lined with dripping rubber irrigation hoses that carried snowmelt from the Andes.

Central Chile's Mediterranean climate, the tour guide explained, is ideal for growing wine grapes. Throughout spring, summer and fall, there's little rain, so winemakers can better control growth. And there's little need for pesticides because the region has few diseases or pests, such as phylloxera, the aphid that in the 19th century devastated much of the world's vineyards. Only Argentina and Chile escaped the plague.

At Concha y Toro, we tasted a peppery 2001 Don Melchor Cabernet served on a barrel top, then descended to the Cellar of the Devil. It was surprisingly cool, thanks to a sand floor and automatic misters. The cellar was given its name by the winery's founder, Don Melchor, who was trying to discourage thieves.

About 45 minutes south of Santiago is Viña Santa Rita, a living museum for the Chilean wine industry. The house that once belonged to the vineyard's 19th century owner, Domingo Fernández Concha, has been converted into the 16-room Hotel Casa Real, a coral-colored Pompeii-style estate built in a U shape around inner gardens, with giant trees and flowering vines cascading over a Spanish tile roof.

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