Oysters and Marine-aged wine

Jessica Cabrera is one of the many Chilean women who make their way through life by being incredibly resourceful with the natural bounty of Chile’s coastline. Jessica is the marine diver and oyster farmer of Dichato and Jessica’s Mussels fame, appearing earlier on daveschilelives.com. And she is still at it.

We recently visited Jessica at her base of operations at the foot of the pier in the Caleta del Medio, in Coliumo Bay just south of Dichato. This is a very rustic, while attractive and busy artisan fishermen’s cove where Jessica has her fishing boat and mariculture concession. It’s in these Pacific waters where she raises oysters and mussels.

After the tsunami that destroyed Dichato in 2010, Jessica rebuilt her business and in the process attempted to expand oyster production in the Bay of Coliumo by convincing her fisherman neighbors to take up this activity, since many had lost their boats in the disaster. But not many of the fishermen were divers, which you must be to carry out this activity, nor did they want to learn, so her efforts to expand in cooperation with others over time have not been successful.

Not only has she not been able to entice others to join her, but the source of “seed” for her “sea farm” disappeared. At first, she was obtaining seed from producers in Bahia Inglesa, in northern Chile, where large areas of scallops and other shellfish mariculture have been established. But that source dried up for her recently. To cope with this situation, she entered into an agreement with a marine research center of the University of Concepcion, which has a small station across the bay in the small fishing village of  Villarrica (not to be confused with the village, lake and volcano in southern Chile of the same name). She now uses this facility to produce the seed she needs for her concession, as well as a new formula of food for the shellfish she is growing, a mixture that includes algae collected in the same Coliumo Bay.

In spite of the setbacks, Jessica is successfully producing first class Japanese and Chilean oysters, selling them to some of the best restaurants in Santiago. The day we visited Coliumo, she had not collected oysters, so unfortunately we were not able to sample them during this visit. Jessica enters the water, surveys her lines, and collects oysters and mussels three times a week, so we have to wait to try them in Santiago. Our plan is to dine soon at a restaurant in Santiago named La Calma, where they serve Jessica’s oysters, and apply the ultimate test, that of taste, with a glass of good Chilean Sauvignon blanc.

It was back in 2013, when I finally visited Dichato three years after the tsunami destroyed this small seaside town, that community social worker Pilar del Canto told me: “In ten years Dichato will be reinvented, more attractive than ever and with better services for visitors and townspeople alike.” (See: Finally, a night in Dichato). It’s now almost twelve years since Pilar made that statement, and she has been proven to be absolutely correct in her optimistic projection.

The day we visited, the beach was filled with happy families, paddleboats and kayaks peacefully cris-crossed the calm waters of the bay near shore, and a large tourist boat was carrying sightseers around the bay, out to the Isla Hormigita and back. Many very attractive restaurants, bars, and cafes have been established around the bay, especially along the wide, rebuilt bayside walkway along the beach, and in the esplanade in the center of Dichato. The town has a large, modern primary health clinic (Cesfam), and a new, well equipped fire department. Dichato has clearly built back better.

We had lunch with Jessica at a local place on the hill behind Coliumo; Los Hornitos de Coliumo, which served delicious chupe de camarones y jaiva, and perfectly fried congrio, that ugly but tasty eel-like fish that abounds in Chile’s cold Pacific waters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These hills around the bay, especially on the Coliumo side, are scattered with an eclectic collection of vacation cabins interspersed with more permanent homes. I will make a Pilar-like prediction that ten years from now, the whole area around the Coliumo side of the bay will be a thriving, beautiful seaside vacation village for Chileans from the surrounding cities of Concepcion and Chillan, a counterpoint to Pingueral, the multistoried condominiums in a more copasetic setting on the other side of the bay.

And if Jessica follows through with a project she told us about, there will be an oyster bar at the middle pier in Coliumo serving cold white wine from the nearby vineyards of the Itata River valley. What could be more attractive than that? In fact, she has her sign ready to be hung on the front of her building, but she is waiting to firm up the wine supply for her oyster and wine bar.

Our discussion with Jessica at this point turned from oysters to wine, and she had a big surprise for us. Jessica has been in cahoots for a while with a wine producer from the Itata valley, in an area called Guarilihue, about an hour and a half inland from Dichato. We were actually staying at a very funky place in Guarilihue, the B&B Villa Taly. Now, Villa Taly, and its owners Consuelo and Hernan, is a whole story begging to be told, but for now we will stay with Jessica and her vintner, who we just found out about. He makes wine under the label of Arcana.

It seems that Jessica has been helping her vintner friend store some of his wine under the sea, in her mariculture concession, where she can keep watch over the bottles and make sure they are not stolen. Well, it happened once that her oysters were heisted, and she discovered vacationers feasting on them in one of the local restaurants. So her “sea farm” now has permanent security cameras, making it safe for the wine to be stored there.

Jessica grows her oysters in webbed “lanterns”, lowered several meters into the sea. They also seem to be just right for storing bottles of wine.

When we visited, she had some bottles of wine that had been under water for over a year, so she gifted us one, to sample back in Santiago.

When we planned our visit to Dichato, we chose Villa Taly as our base for a few days, because we had been informed by another very important friend of ours, Elba Hormazabal, a young enologist at Viña Almaviva, that this spot was worth visiting. It is in the middle of a very interesting, somewhat unknown winegrowing area of Chile; the Itata River valley. This is where the Spaniards that brought the first Catholic priests to Chile landed and settled. This is where the first grape vines were planted in Chile for their wine, and those vines still grow on the hillsides of this very beautiful part of Chile that is now the Nuble Region.

Around Guarilihue, there are numerous small vineyards, micro-artisan wine producers, making very special wines from the traditional varieties brought by the Spaniards: País (or Mission grape), Moscatel de Alejandria, Semillon, and Cinsault. Although there are new vineyards being planted, much of the wine is produced from ungrafted ancient vines growing in the traditional bush-trained mode, without added support to the vines.

Our visit to Guarilihue was too short to even begin to appreciate the history and special nature of grape growing and wine making in this part of the Itata river valley. But we will surely return for another stay at Villa Taly and visit some of the very special wine makers in this region.

So, we packed away our bottle of marine-aged wine, and returned to Santiago where we organized a special opening and tasting of this mysterious looking bottle Jessica had given us in Coliumo.

Late one evening, as the sun was setting on Santiago, we gathered on our patio with our long-time friends Keka and Mariano Fernandez for this momentous occasion. Mariano and I opened the bottle and carefully poured a small amount of crisp, clear white wine, from the Semillon grape, into four glasses. Keka was the first to sip a bit, while Ximena prepared four plates of a dozen oysters each, and we proceeded to taste the wine. Mariano is a real sommelier, so we tend to defer to him for descriptions of wines we taste. But each of us, of course, must alone determine a wine’s merits.

“Very clear for a five-year old white wine.” “Nice and dry.” We all agreed that the wine must have started out very good to begin with, because after a year under the sea, it was a very good Semillon wine.

However, we each also determined, as we sipped the wine and ate the oysters, that a pleasant aftertaste lingered, a sensation as much as a taste, well after swallowing the wine. Could this be the effects of the motion of the sea around the bottle? Or the depth and temperature where the bottles floated for a year? We felt this undefinable taste must surely be some sort of influence from the sea.

The sun had set long ago, and as we were finishing the last of the oysters and the last few drops of the marine-aged wine, we easily came to the conclusion that the best, if not only, possible source of the enticing aftertaste of our wine must be…. a mermaid’s kiss. 

Thanks, Jessica. That was fun.

Posted in Santiago, Chile, on March 4, 2025.