Until recently Montes, 64, rode 60 km in 24-hour endurance races at weekends. That was until he decided to learn to fly helicopters – he’s already a certified fixed-wing pilot. With his instructor he commutes in a fire- engine-red chopper with its ‘AM’ personalised plates between the capital, Santiago, his Apalta winery and a new vineyard he established in the Colchagua Valley.
Montes and his partner Douglas Murray started with a mere $50,000 in capital. Today, his brand Viña Montes sells to more than 100 countries and produces 700,000 12-bottle cases a year. Each case sells for an average of $63.00, double the Chilean average. Asked if he were ever tempted to sell, he replied: “Here in Chile we don’t sell our wives, our toothbrushes, or our company.”
He has already opened Kaiken Wines in Argentina in 2002, run by Aurelio Montes Junior since 2011. Montes Senior is also considering a range of cosmetics based on grape products and has launched Chile’s most expensive wine, the Taita, at $300.00 a bottle. Only 3,000 bottles are made each year: It spends two years in oak, and then four years ‘resting’. While it’s maturing, Gregorian chants are played in the barrel room between 9:30 am and 7.00 pm. The music forms part of the feng shui principles Montes embraced prior to building the Montes winery at Apalta in 2004.
In harmony
Montes could best be described as a businessman with a spiritual side. “Sometimes God takes you by the hand and leads you,” he said when asked about his early career decisions. “Yes, spirituality can be a strong marketing tool,” he admitted. “People tell me they never forget a visit to my winery. The music, the feeling of the place. Did you know we have never had unions at our vineyards because the staff are so happy? They never needed them.”
Montes has worked with Sylvia Galleguillos, a Chilean feng shui master, for more than a decade: Feng shui is an ancient Chinese practice devoted to working in harmony with nature, and which claims to obtain energy and vitality from nautral elements such as wind and water. Having trained in the UK and China, Galleguillos founded the Chilean School of Feng Shui in 1995 and has consulted to more than 1,000 projects including La Moneda, the palace of the president of the Republic of Chile. Galleguillos worked with the architect of the Montes winery, Samuel Claro, to ensure the most auspicious design. “Before the Apalta winery was built I visited the site to assess the best location, alignment and orientation for the main structure.” The aim was to find the most advantageous place for the centre of the winery’s main building, using what in feng shui is called the site’s ‘shi’ or configuration, and its ‘xing’ or form. “By configuration I mean the site’s visual relationship with the larger landscape around it; specifically what the mountains and hills surrounding it and its water sources look like with respect to it.”
Galleguillos says feng shui “seeks to harmonise heart and mind with external nature. Such dimensions as the Chinese call ‘influences of benign spirits’ and which in our culture we might call ‘influences of angels’.” She visits the vineyard regularly to suggest ways to ensure continued connection with nature. “I conduct such seasonal ceremonies as are vital to a human practice closely harmonised with nature, from a classical Chinese perspective.”
But does it work?
Writer Adam Lechmere, who also visited Montes, commented: “I have no argument with feng shui at all – I know hardly anything about it, but know it is an ancient and serious discipline – but I thought Sylvia Galleguillos spoke a lot of half-formed mumbo-jumbo, the sort of stuff you could learn from a weekend in Beijing and half an hour on Google.” Writer Christine Austin had a different view. “It’s easy to get carried away by the imagery of feng shui – the turtles, tigers, birds and dragons. A red wall here and family photos there, but we all know the value of a workplace feeling ‘right’. That is the real value of feng shui within the Montes winery. Aurelio Montes told me: ‘I don’t believe the wine will be any better for it’.”
The animals are definitely better off. Hundreds of trees are left on the Apalta property to provide ‘corridors’ for animals. As part of the feng shui process, Montes encourages animals, birds and insects. “The foxes eat the rabbits, and sometimes if we have too many rabbits, I eat them too.”
Best practice viticulture has its place; the 135 ha of vines at Apalta are all dry farmed. Since 2009, water use on the estate has been cut from 4,000 cubic metres to 1,800 cubic metres, saving the company $120,000 a year. “This is enough water for 19,000 families,” said Montes. “We discovered we were over-watering. We found the plants needed only half of what we initially put on them.” The result is much more concentrated juice from the grapes, though lower returns of about three tonnes a hectare compared with six to eight tonnes elsewhere in the country.
Montes flew his helicopter to Marchigue to show the 600 ha he planted in 2000. Water is an issue on this property, as it is in most of Chile. “We could buy more land for vines but we do not have the water for them.” He adds: “We created a mini real estate revolution when we moved here. Before we arrived land cost $2,000.00 a hectare. Now it costs $30,000.00.”
