The 17 Best Places to Drink and Do in Chile

A titanium and bronze roof catches the Andes light like something that wandered off a design school thesis and into the Chilean wine country. The vineyard and estate at Viña VIK covers a few thousand hectares, and exploring it by horseback or mountain bike is the point, whether you're scouting the organic garden or simply getting lost among the vines. It holds the top spot on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list, which tracks.

The undulating roof of the bodega was designed to echo the silhouette of the Andes, which sets the tone for a place that takes its symbolism seriously. Almaviva is a Franco-Chilean winery in the Maipo Valley offering guided visits by appointment, ending in a tasting at the manor house. A collaboration between the Rothschild and Concha y Toro families, it holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list, and pours accordingly.

Forty hectares of Renaissance-style gardens surround this storied Chilean winery about 45 minutes outside Santiago, and the grounds alone could fill an afternoon. Tours wind past a Neo-Gothic chapel, Roman-style baths, and an Andean museum before ending in the cellars with wine and cheese. You can cover the property by bike, horse-drawn carriage, or a pedal-powered bar on wheels, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds. It ranks 41st on the World's 50 Best Vineyards list.

Helicopter rides over the vines, picnics between the rows, bike tours, blending sessions, and three restaurants with genuinely different identities: Casas del Bosque has built one of the more complete vineyard-visit programs you'll find anywhere in wine country. The whitewashed adobe houses and organic kitchen garden give it an unhurried, estate feel. It ranks among the World's 50 Best Vineyards, if you need a number to convince anyone in your group.

A cocktail bar in Barrio Italia where the current menu is organized around precious stones, so you order a ruby or an opal instead of a drink. The Ópalo leans on blended scotch with chestnut and tamarind, which sounds like a dare and drinks like a good idea. The Thai kitchen next door is doing serious work too, but the bar is its own reason to show up.

The marquee experience here is lunch with the winemakers themselves, not a guide with a clipboard. Villard is a boutique Casablanca Valley winery where the father-and-son team leads tours of the cellars and, if you book ahead, sits down at the table with you for a three-course meal. The visit starts in the Tanagra plot, a small parcel producing single-vineyard Syrah only in exceptional years, which sets the tone nicely before the food appears.

Bordeaux know-how transplanted to the Andean foothills, which turns out to be a very good idea when Cabernet Sauvignon is the goal. Viña Aquitania is a working winery in Peñalolen where the team produces structured reds from Maipo valley grapes that ripen slowly in the dry Andean climate. Come to walk the vineyard, taste through the lineup, and understand why two serious French winemakers flew this far to find their terroir.

The Pacific sits four kilometres west of this hillside vineyard, close enough that the fog rolls in and keeps things cool, which is exactly what the Sauvignon Blanc wants. Marín and her sons farm around 50 hectares in Lo Abarca's San Antonio Valley, and the family's bed and breakfast, Villa Miramar, sits high enough in the vines that the views do most of the talking. A Discovery from The 50 list.

Bare brick archways from an old-school winery sit a short walk from a solar-powered spiral building that looks like it landed from the future, and somehow the two get along fine. Viña Errázuriz is a winery visit in the Aconcagua Valley, credited with planting the region's first French grape varieties. The contrast between the restored historic cellars and the gravity-flow, geothermal Icon Winery makes the tour feel less like a tasting and more like an argument about time.

A mountain winery so far above the valley floor that the vines are the highest commercial ones in Chile, and the absence of surrounding lights turns the quartz-threaded soil into something that shimmers under the moon. Visits include a look at the working vineyards and a demonstration of traditional foot-treading, which is exactly what it sounds like and somehow still manages to be romantic. Worth the drive up into the Andes.