At Viñas, a Chilean-style wine and tapas bar, wine is in the name, which means “vineyards.” It’s also on the ceiling, with wine barrel light fixtures and vineyard-like pergola roofs, as well as the bar, which bulges with barrel-stave ribs and shorn-barrel shelves. It’s opposite the bar, too, where a tidy glass enclosure is stacked with bottles.
Wine, whose power swells on the cusp of Valentine’s Day, is also what I was there for. And saying so immediately excited owner Mario Mena, who manned the bar. Chatty, generous and hardly able to contain his excitement, he led with hospitality, imploring me to sample a carménère, an old European varietal he told me was first grown for wine in the Bordeaux region of France. As conditions became unfavorable, the cultivar died out on the Continent—but not, he said, before being accidentally transplanted to Chile, where by some minor miracle conditions were and remain just right. I couldn’t register a specific impression of the sample I sipped while he told me the tale, but I know I enjoyed both.
I told him in turn I wanted to try a flight ($25), which drew four selections from Viñas’s tight by-the-glass menu. Moving from lighter to heavier, I first tasted a ’22 unoaked chardonnay from Montes, one of Chile’s premier wineries. A clean nose balanced citric brightness and musky richness, with easy vanilla and melon notes emerging late in the glass. On the palate, it was a blend of almost-ripe citrus fruits, taking on a lemony tang when I held it, with a light and not-quite savory minerality. It was highly crushable, finishing with mild tannins that, along with that pleasant nose, invited each following sip.
Next was a ’24 Cono Sur pinot, an organic Chilean red whose nose was full of jammy, almost candied cherry, plum and strawberry. “Delicious,” I thought, and I hadn’t even tasted it yet. On the palate, a wooly blanket of dry tannins smothered the fruit—an overcorrection. But I could have nosed it all night.
Third was Viñas’s freshly bottled private-label red blend, Don Abel, produced in collaboration with Wallingford’s Paradise Hills Vineyard and, if memory serves, primarily made from California-grown grapes. The cherry pie nose was intoxicating, with touches of vanilla caramel, green apple and late-coming cocoa powder as well as a hint of musk. A clarion rush of stewed red fruit to taste gathered funk and tartness toward the finish. It was really enjoyable, with nice complexity, and certainly one of the finest Connecticut-produced wine experiences I can recall.
The final leg of my flight was Montes’s ’22 Alpha cabernet sauvignon, and I wasn’t quite braced for turbulence. The nose was extremely assertive, blasting me with a confusing mix of overripe fruit and caffeinated acidity. It reminded me of what TV tells me a meth lab would smell like—until I went back to the Viñas blend and quickly back to this, which for some reason suddenly deepened and unified the nose into a slice of cheesecake drizzled in rich caramel and raspberry sauces. An analogous albeit less profound shift happened on the palate, turning something murky and oddly thin into a much more clarified and fuller-bodied dry red. Still, no matter how many times I switched back and forth, I preferred the Viñas blend.
A Connecticut-made wine that’s better than a celebrated Chilean one? In my opinion, at least on that evening, yes.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims.
