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Concha y Toro Viña, Chile

Entrance to the Cellar of the Devil (Castillo del Diablo)

2003-12-05

Castilla del Diablo is one of the more popular Concha y Toro wines, and is exported to many countries in the world, Canada included.  But the wine's name, Castillo del Diablo (Cellar of the Devil) has a story behind it.  

The underground cellars that the wine is aged in are metres below the ground level, in order to have a cool, constant temperature.  At some point in the early history of the Viña, the owner noticed bottles of his best wine were going missing from the cellar.  After some investigation, he discovered that small children from the village  were climbing down the ventilation passages down to the cellars, and taking bottles of wine.  Presumably, they would give them to their parent, who would sell them or drink them.  The owner of the Viña was a small fellow, and rather than trying to stop the thieves, he arranged to have a drink with the village gossip.  He let the gossip know that he had seen Diablo in his wine cellar.  Well, this ploy worked, soon the whole village knew about the Devil in the cellar, and the thefts of wine stopped.  This was very good for a while, and the story goes that some time later the men of the village showed up at the Viña with torches and pitchforks, wanting to kill the Devil in the cellar.  The owner, wily as he was, told them no problem, go and kill the Devil in the cellar, but know that whoever killed the Devil in the cellar would get 7 years of bad luck.  That took care of that problem.

Finally, they put up the inscription "No hay Diablo leso", which literally means "There is no stupid Devil".  But in south American Spanish, it more properly says "There is no Devil, stupid".  And so the legend continues to this day.  

As a final note, in the very back of El Castillo del Diablo, they have a room with very little light, lots of spiderwebs, and a silhouette of the Devil in the back, just to add to the experience.