Carolina França, recently appointed Director of Enology at Apaltagua

Carolina was born in Madeira, Portugal and has lived in Chile since 2008.

For over four generations her family has lived in Portugal surrounded by vineyards and it is because of this that her passion for agronomy and viticulture started at a very young age. She studied at the Universidad de Trás os Montes e Alto Douro in Vila Real, a region surrounded by mountains in the north of Portugal.

During the five years in which she studied enology at the university, she worked at various winegrowing regions of Portugal, such as the Vinho Verde or green wine regions of Douro, Alentejo and Madeira. She also has enological experience from jobs carried out at various wineries in Spain.

In 2008 she became interested in learning about other cultures and enological practices. It was for this reason that she traveled to Chile. The beautiful countryside, the weather, the cultural and enological experiences made her fall in love with the country and she decided to settle there.

Her first winemaking job was in the Colchagua Valley where she worked at Caliterra winery for four years.

In 2013, the French winemaker Benjamin Mei, invited her to join the Apaltagua team, a winery famous for the production of numerous French grape varieties grown in Chile’s most prestigious winegrowing valleys.

In January 2014, she was hired by the Portuguese Sogrape group to be in charge of the enological department of a winery located in Requinoa found in the Sixth Region of Chile.

Three years later, in August 2016, Carolina was tempted to return to the Colchagua Valley to work at her Apaltagua “home”. Since that time, she has worked closely with the winemaker Pablo Barros. As of October 2019 she has been honored with the position of Director of Enology from where she will continue to work proudly to offer the company’s demanding clients wines of excellence. The company, which owns five vineyards in five different valleys, produces wines with very distinct characteristics due to different soils and climatic conditions. The wines that are produced by Carolina are exported to over 45 countries throughout the world and have won important accolades in the most famous competitions worldwide.

Her spirit and passion for the production of new and innovative wines continues. Carolina hopes to have the chance of meeting all of the company’s clients so that she can receive feedback about her wines. She is aware that each country has different tastes and she finds it most enriching to learn what each market is looking for in wines.