It was the end of a large press and trade wine tasting last spring, and after tasting dozens of wines, my mouth was tired. The notion of tasting even one more wine was a turnoff. But then I noticed, on a table of Casa Lapostolle wines from Chile, a not-quite-empty bottle of the winery’s top label: Clos Apalta 2001 ($65). This had been the first Chilean wine to achieve a 95-point “classic” rating from the Wine Spectator. On that periodical’s top 100 for 2005, Clos Apalta placed at no. 2. I’d never tasted the wine, and now curiosity overcame palate fatigue.

Actually, it was the wine itself that refreshed my senses. A blend of carmenere, merlot, and cabernet sauvignon, Clos Apalta had potent, dark-cherry aromatics. In the mouth, it was rich and fleshy, meaty and spicy. It seemed to jump to my palate. So many wines are good, so few are distinctive. This one stood apart. The achievement was all the more striking for a wine bred in a country that until the mid-1990s specialized in easygoing, value-priced wines that were easily sipped and just as easily forgotten.

Last week, the French-born founder of Casa Lapostolle, Alexandra Marnier Lapostolle, came to Bulthaup Showroom in SoHo to introduce a new wine that is meant to be the equal Clos Apalta. Oddly named Borobo, this wine from the 2001 vintage is an iconoclastic blend of a quintet of grapes with roots in diverse French regions. Bordeaux is represented by merlot, cabernet sauvignon, and carmenere (no longer planted in Bordeaux, but thriving in Chile), totaling 45% of the blend. That’s the “Bo.” Twenty percent is the Rhone variety syrah, or the “Ro.” The other 35% is pinot noir, which ought to be “Bu,” as in Burgundy, but no matter; Borobo certainly rolls off the tongue easily enough. Before presenting the final blend, each component of the wine was presented in separate glasses by Ms. Marnier Lapostolle and Michel Rolland, the Bordeaux-based uber-consultant who has worked with her since she founded Casa Lapostolle in 1994.

The eyebrow-raiser in Borobo is the use of pinot noir as a blending grape. While all the other components of the wine are fair game for blending, pinot noir has always been a solo act. Above all, it’s a grape valued for delicate contours of flavor and texture. Pinot noir can kiss you deeply but always gently. Certainly this example did. It comes from the Casablanca region due west of Santiago, cooled by fogs and breezes from the nearby Pacific Ocean. But wouldn’t the delicacy of this pinot noir be obliterated by the hard-charging Bordeaux and Rhone varieties? “To be honest,” Mr. Rolland said, “I thought that the percentage of pinot noir in the blend could be much lower, no more than 5% to 10%. But it was lost at that level, not giving its personality at all. And so we raised the proportion to more than one-third of the blend to finally get the quality of the fruit to really speak.”

As in a chord, each contributing element of Barobo brings dimension to the final blend: cabernet backbone, merlot flesh, carmenere spice, syrah depth all woven together by the silky thread of pinot noir. Patience was required for the elements to harmonize in this 2001 vintage. “It’s not often,” Mr. Rolland said, “that a wine is first shown four years after harvest.” Borobo will reach select Manhattan retail shelves next month.

Globalism may have its downside, but surely not the decision of Ms. Marnier Lapostolle, great-great-granddaughter and namesake of Alexandre Marnier, creator of Grand Marnier liquor, to put down wine roots far from her native France. “I wanted to extend the wine side of our business,” she said. “I’d heard that prephylloxera vines still existed in Chile … so I went down in 1993 to explore.” (Phylloxera is a root-eating aphid that killed off vines in 19th-century Europe but not then in the new world, although it plagued California in the 1990’s.)

Ms. Marnier Lapostolle liked what she saw in Chile, particularly the vineyards of old vines, some planted a century ago, in the horseshoe-shaped Apalta Valley in the Rapel region. She asked Mr. Rolland to have a look, and he liked it, too. Ms. Marnier Lapostolle invested heavily in the Apalta Valley on behalf of her family. Low yields leading to intense flavors would be the key to nudging up the bar on quality, but that ran counter to the prevailing local belief in high yields. “One grower proudly showed me a trellis that had been toppled over by the weight of the grapes on it,” Ms. Marnier Lapostolle said. “I had a hard time getting them to reduce yields. When we finally began to crush our first low yield vintage, I invited the growers to come into the winery to see the color of the must. When they saw how dark it was, and smelled the purity of aromas, they finally understood the difference in intensity that low yields make.”

Casa Lapostolle’s next innovation is a new, mainly underground, “all gravity” winery set to open at Clos Apalta in January. Typically, a winery is rife with pumps that carry the grapes between crushers, vats, barrels, and the bottling line. “Gravity is not just a crazy ideal,” Mr. Rolland insisted. “It’s a way to respect the grapes, which make the best wine when they are handled minimally.” At the new Apalta winery, each winemaking step, from crushing to bottling, will take place one level lower than the previous step, the lowest being 66 feet down. “When we started to dig,” Ms. Marnier Lapostolle said, “we were told it was mostly earth. Instead, we had to blast our way through almost solid granite. But when we’re done, we’ll have the closest thing to a perfect winery.”

If Casa Lapostolle’s best wines, already impressive by any standard, improve even marginally as a result of total gravity care, the wine world will become a more interesting place.

Recommended Wines

CASA LAPOSTOLLE SAUVIGNON BLANC 2004 ($10) Citric and floral rather than grassy, this is a wine of amplitude, even lushness. Ms. Marnier Lapostolle’s roots are in the Sancerre region of the Loire Valley, but she affirmed that “we’re not trying to copy the flinty Sancerre style.” Vive la difference! And vivethe price.

CASA LAPOSTOLLE SYRAH 2003, CUVEE ALEXANDRE ($18) Inky color, then an aroma of what another taster aptly called “elegant bacon.” Big flavor muscle in this wine, with more of that elegant bacon. This will handle any winter beef stew. The grapes came from a vineyard where chardonnay failed to do well, Ms. Marnier Lapostolle noted, and so it was grafted over to syrah, which seems to be a happy camper.

CASA LAPOSTOLLE CLOS APALTA 2002 ($65) Eighty-five percent carmenere-merlot (the label is cagey about the exact mix) and 15% cabernet sauvignon. Less giving now than the 2001 vintage that all but jumped out of my glass last spring. There is an alluring element of mystery in the nose of this 2002, and in the mouth it is a dense blend of black cherries, dark chocolate, and a new oak vanilla. Tannins are ample but fine. Give it time.

CASA LAPOSTOLLE BOROBO 2001 (ABOUT $65 UPON RELEASE NEXT MONTH) “What I love to do best is blending,” Mr. Rolland said, and his skills are evident in this amalgam of fivegrapes. Compared to Clos Apalta, Borobo seems more transparent in flavor and readier to drink, no doubt due to the finesse of 35% pinot noir. Lovely stuff, and unlike other red wine I’ve ever tasted.