It was lunchtime at Cafe Gray at Time Warner Center, and I was sitting with the partners in a new Chilean winery, Guillermo Luksic and Laurent Dassault. From time to time, smiling diners seemed to be approaching our table, but they passed us by for the table just to our rear, where they greeted Richard Parsons, chairman of Time Warner, who was dining with a handsome young woman.

If those paying their respects to Mr. Parsons were excited by proximity to wealth, however, they should have given a nod to our table. Mr. Luksic’s family, said to be the wealthiest in Chile, is no. 139 on Forbes’s list of the “World’s Richest People,” while Mr. Dassault’s French family is 49th. The two titans, whose combined worth, according to Forbes, is $12 billion, were in New York to introduce the first two red wines from Altair, their new winery in the Cachapoal Valley south of Santiago. I hope the wine chosen by Mr. Parsons and his tablemate was as good as the Chilean newcomers at our table. The wines we tasted, Sideral and the eponymous Altair, were ringers for well-bred Bordeaux.

Last Thursday, at my home table, I opened another newly introduced wine that’s surfing the sweet spot in the Chilean wave. Called “Purple Angel,” it’s made by Montes, itself a relatively new winery (founded in 1988) and already at the top of the Chilean hierarchy. Purple Angel is made primarily from Carmenere, a grape originally brought to Chile from France, where it was nearly extinguished by phylloxera in the 19th century. Now Carmenere, here sourced from the Colchagua Valley, is the signature red wine grape of Chile. Unapologetically tannic, spicy, and thrusting, Purple Angel might have been mistaken for a young, full-throttle California Bordeaux blend.

Two evenings earlier, the wine on my table had been yet another new Chilean red, Vina Leyda’s Leyda Valley pinot noir, Lot 21, 2002. Chile’s wine culture, Bordeaux influenced since the 1850s, seems never to have given a serious thought to pinot noir until recently. Considering how tricky this grape can be to raise and vinify, that’s probably just as well. But now comes this offering – from a coastal Pacific vineyard cooled by morning fogs – that could be mistaken for a fine pinot noir from Oregon.

The ambition and discipline required to produce a trio of wines at the quality level of Altair, Purple Angel, and Leyda Valley are relatively new to Chile. Until the early 1990s, the country did quite well, thank you, producing pleasingly ripe red and white wines of gentle character, many exported to America. Whenever friends asked for red wine under $10 to go with dinner or even a cook-out, I always felt comfortable (and still would) suggesting a merlot called Casillero del Diablo made by the venerable Concha y Toro winery. That wine is fleshy and plumy but not tannic, and it goes with just about everything – a wine to savor but not to contemplate. (Casa Lapostelle merlot, for a couple dollars more, is a relative newcomer that might be even better than Casillero del Diablo.)

Chile’s easygoing wines of old were the result of relaxed winemaking. High grape yields were the norm, resulting in wines lacking in flavor concentration. Grape types were not always matched to ideal soils and climate. Oak aging techniques could be haphazard. The results, for American consumers, were wines that rarely cost more than $10. The arrival, beginning in the late 1970s, of such wine-savvy new investors as the Torres family of Spain, the Rothschilds and Marnier-Lapostelles of France, and the Mondavis of California steadily raised Chilean wine quality. Meanwhile, the $10-andunder wines that had once sold well in America struggled against new entries from other countries, notably Australia, which is now the second-largest supplier of imported wine to America behind Italy. Chile, once in third place, has dropped to fourth, just ahead of France.

Birthing a new winery is normally as unhurried as the seasons, but Altair, thanks to a meeting of minds and checkbooks, was created with exceptional speed. Messrs. Dassault and Luksic, both aviators and already owners of wine enterprises, first met in Chile in 2000. They quickly decided to spare nothing to create Altair, named for a brilliant star in the Eagle constellation. A new winery was nestled into the Andean foothills of Cachapoal. Existing vineyards owned by Mr. Luksic’s Vina San Pedro were pressed into service. French and Chilean oenologists got to work on the wine, and – voila! – just two years after the partners shook hands, Vina Altair created its first vintage of Bordeaux-style wines. The flagship wine is called Altair and is meant for aging, while the more modestly priced Sideral can be sipped now or cellared.

Like those two Altair wines, Montes’s Purple Angel has a firm tannic backbone and reserved palate. While Montes was the first Chilean winery to release an ultra premium syrah, two years ago, it hung back while just about every other major player released a Carmenere, a grape for which Chile has no serious competition. “We wanted to study Carmenere and observe how it ages, and get it right,” said Douglas Murray, managing director of Montes, at a lunch last week introducing Purple Angel and other new Montes wines from Chile and Argentina. The guardian angel icon on this wine’s label is also to be found on every other Montes’s wine. “After several near-mortal road accidents,” Mr. Murray said, “I came away believing.”

Leyda Valley Bin 21 pinot noir is from an officially designated viticultural area of the same name, Chile’s newest. An hour’s drive west of Santiago, it’s too dry to grow grapes, but the Vina Leyda winery (founded in 1997) invested in a 5-mile-long irrigation pipe from the Maipo River, which carries Andean snowmelt in summer, making viticulture possible. “The winery fought for the new designation,” says Jose Perez of T. Edwards, Leyda Valley’s local distributor. “Normally, it wouldn’t have been allowed to have the same name as the viticultural area, but since it was there first, they can keep the name.”