Louis-Antoine Luyt El Mismo Pais

About Louis-Antoine Luyt El Mismo Pais

Louis-Antoine Luyt El Mismo Pais is a fresh and light-bodied dry red made of Chile’s iconic País. Great with a chill, this is a blend of both carbonic maceration and traditional fermentation. Bottled one month after harvest, this is a quaffable and easy-drinking red. Bright cranberry and strawberry fruit, burnt sage, and dusty tannins.

About Louis-Antoine Luyt 

He may be a native Burgundian, but Louis-Antoine Luyt has quickly become a seminal voice in the fight for independent, terroir-driven winemaking in Chile. In a country where wine production is run almost entirely by enormous industrial wineries, “LA” has managed to source fruit and rent vines from independent farmers throughout the Maule Valley. Furthermore, his insistence on dry farming, horse plowing, organic and native yeast/intervention-free winemaking is welcome proof that wines outside of Europe can successfully be produced with this work philosophy.

At 22, LA was sick of living in France. With the excuse of polishing up his Spanish, he planned a three month trip to South America. This quickly became a permanent vacation of sorts; needing to find work, LA found a gig as a dishwasher at a local restaurant. Working his way up, he eventually became the wine buyer and was introduced to Hector Vergara, who at the time was the only Master of Wine in South America. Hector was opening a sommelier school in Santiago, and Louis-Antoine was amongst his first students.

This gave LA the opportunity to taste wines from all over the world, of course with a particularly strong focus accorded to Chilean wine:

“At first, I was surprised at how homogenous Chilean wine tasted to me; this sparked an interest in local wine and the people who made it. What I came to realize is that there are incredible vineyard sites here, and even though a large part of it is completely industrialized, there were still some independently run parcels. Everyone told me they were worthless, but I didn’t believe it.”

Despite the quality of the land, these grapes were either being sold to huge wineries or being used by the local peasants to make wine for personal consumption.

A plan was beginning to form…

The next step was to learn how to make wine. Louis-Antoine flew back to France to study viticulture and enology in Beaune. During his studies, he befriended Mathieu Lapierre and a subsequent five consecutive harvests in Villié-Morgon led to a great friendship with the Lapierre family. It was also L.A’s introduction to natural wine, a philosophy he became determined to bring back to Chile.

Now armed with a firm knowledge of viticulture and winemaking, Louis-Antoine founded Clos Ouvert with two partners in 2006: the project focused on sourcing organic, fair-trade fruit and making spontaneous fermentation, intervention-free wines to export to France. After a disastrous 2010 earthquake destroyed 70% of their 2009 production, Louis-Antoine’s partners decided to back out of the project. Instead of giving up, LA pushed things further: he immediately started renting eight hectares of vines and vinifying two new lines of wines, all while continuing to make Clos Ouvert bottlings.

In 2019, Louis-Antoine and his wife decided to move back to France, marking yet another massive shift in the Luyt saga. Starting with 2018
vintage, viticulture, and winemaking have been fully entrusted to the farmers Louis-Antoine has formed the strongest bonds with over a decade of collaboration. As such, the name of the farmer is prominently featured on the back labels of each different Pipeño bottling. Louis-Antoine travels to Chile at key moments of the season, including harvest time, the early stages of vinification, and bottling to lend a helping hand with his expertise. He then buys the finished wines from the farmers in a négociant model.

Though there are always side projects and new wines (he really can’t help himself), the Pipeños are now the main focus of the Luyt production. Taking heed of past experience with the project, Louis-Antoine has come to accept that the primeur-style, ultra-natural approach to winemaking that works incredibly well when served right from the tank in Chile sometimes needs a little TLC before exportation. As such, he has started setting simple, helpful guidelines for the farmers, like purchasing stainless steel tanks to rack the wine after fermentation and, if deemed necessary, lightly filtering the wines prior to bottling. Sulfur, which was not always added, will now be standard in very small doses at bottling.