Colo Colo, Chile’s most popular football squad, has teamed up with Vina San Pedro to launch a new range of wines to be sold as part of the club’s merchandising.
The wines, whose labels sport the club’s distinctive symbol of a Mapuche chieftain’s head, are available only in Chile.
The range consists of a blended red wine on sale for US$1.7 (€1.3) per bottle and the other, a Cabernet Sauvignon, at US$9 (€6.9) per bottle, made under the auspices of new San Pedro winemaker Marco Puyo.
Based in Macul, Santiago, Colo Colo is reputed to be Chile’s most popular football club, with a die-hard fan base spread across the country. It is the only Chilean club to have won the Libertadores Cup (in 1991), and was runner-up in last year’s South American Cup.
According to San Pedro, the club’s recent success has led to unexpectedly high demand.
‘Sales have been extraordinary – in the first month they were three times what we forecast,’ a spokesperson from the winery told decanter.com. ‘Nevertheless, we know that this kind of product is very unstable, because it relies on fashion or the performance of the team, so we are quite conservative in terms of ambitions. We expect to sell about 3m litres of the wine per year.’
Colo Colo is by no means the first football team to launch a wine; trailblazers in this regard include the likes of Italian club Juventus and Argentina’s Boca Juniors, who launched Boca Premium Cabernet Sauvignon in 2004.
Written by Peter Richards
