On the bottle: Chilean wineBob Tyrer

I have in my attic a heavy leather suitcase full of rather fine ponchos that my children won’t let me wear (too embarrassing). Three floors down, in the cellar, there’s a scattering of old South American wine bottles including a treasured Peruvian empty. I drank its contents on a rainy night in the Andes while ostensibly looking for homicidal Maoist guerrillas.

I was once a reporter in Latin America. I lived in Rio, the great seductress, but I frequently made my excuses and left on the plane to repressed, unhappy, military-ruled Chile. What I needed was wine — Brazil’s was awful. Chile’s could be so-so, but there was a vineyard in the suburbs of Santiago that produced a sumptuous cabernet sauvignon. Every time there was a general strike in Chile, my Rio cellar grew.

While I enjoyed this ridiculous lifestyle, Eduardo Chadwick, a lanky young Chilean, was helping his father to relaunch the family wine business, Errazuriz. Their vineyards had gone during a land-reform programme, but under General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship they recovered them. It’s an uncomfortable truth that today’s wonderful Chilean wine industry grew out of Pinochet-era economic policies.

A quick wine fact: like humans, vines need to cool down. In Chile, they enjoy ocean breezes. Next door in Argentina, they grow high in the Andes in almost sublime conditions for wine-making. Yet the legion of elderly waiters in Buenos Aires served me reds that were an insult to the country’s luscious meat. A French friend tried to drag an Argentinian winery out of the 19th century. “They simply pretend to do as I tell them,” he sighed.

How things change. It’s hard now to find a bad Chilean wine, and there are Argentinians of poise and class. But they can be very expensive. Eduardo Chadwick, who now runs Errazuriz, pitted his most ambitious reds against Bordeaux’s finest in a blind tasting in London this month. His top-of-the-range Sena (£50) came only fifth out of 12, but his cheaper, seductive Don Maximiano Reserve 2004 (£25) was fourth, with a dull Chateau Latour 2005 (£995) eighth.

Argentina, meanwhile, listens now to French advice. The day after the Errazuriz tasting, I tried several £40+ bottles of Cheval des Andes, made in association with Bordeaux’s Château Cheval Blanc (£775). If the uber-Chileans seemed Californian with their joyous, blackcurranty fruit, these ultra-Argentinians showed the French hand in the dark, savoury notes of a wine built for ageing. I’d put any of these high-end South Americans in my cellar if I could afford them, but I can’t; so I opened my last 1978 from Chile (bought for £4). It tasted of tar. Or perhaps it was tear gas.

LIQUID HUNCHES

Coyam 2006, £12.50

Organic, prize-winning, almost black and built for a long life. Try this Chilean young to enjoy rich, plummy fruit jostling with a dash of coal tar. Terrific with anything charred from the grill (vintageroots.co.uk).

Casillero del Diablo merlot 2008, £6.99

The “devil’s lair” was once a treat drunk by Chilean colonels in exclusive restaurants. It’s now a bargain: splendid quality at low cost (Majestic).

Fabre Montmayou Gran Reserva malbec 2007, £11.99

Made by a Frenchman in Argentina, this is great value. The malbec grape, a brute in France, is transformed into feminine new-world fruit, but with tannic depths (sundaytimeswineclub.co.uk).