Most wine tastings are relaxed affairs where you can graze the bottles in any order you choose and sip and spit at will.

Some, like the one I went to in London last week, are altogether more formal. Everyone sits at long tables behind a set of glasses, facing the front. This time it was a tasting of the so-called icon wines of Chile’s Vina Errazuriz, presented by the man who made them, Francesco Baettig.

“How do we define an icon?” he asked, and with that various pictures popped up on a screen, including Marilyn Monroe, a Ferrari and Nelson Mandela. The talk turned to iconic wines and the images changed to Chateau Latour, Chateau Lafite and yes, you guessed it, Vina Errazuriz.

To be fair, Errazuriz feels it has earned the right to sit at wine’s top table. In 2004 it organised a blind tasting in Berlin where it pitched its top Bordeaux blends Sena and Vinedo Chadwick against some of the world’s grandest wines, including the above. Stripped naked without their awe-inspiring names, the old guard was soundly thrashed.

The Berlin tasting was rolled out to other cities and the results came back much the same, though not in Tokyo or London where some of the judges claimed the Chilean wines were easy to spot. Overall it was a boost to the country’s self-esteem and helped push Vinedo Chadwick to more than £100 a bottle. Yet this is still well below the top grands crus chateaux, whose ever-increasing prices serve to reaffirm their iconic status.

I met my first “icon wine” while visiting the wine lands of Argentina. A typical tasting would begin with the basic level and rise through the ranks until the “icon” was unveiled. It would be dressed in the shiniest, heaviest bottle known to man and come with a CV listing all its medals and, if favourable, its score from the influential US critic Robert Parker.

At times it was like meeting an all-American family, starting with the infants and ending with the eldest son, who was clearly his parents’ pride and joy. They would recite a list of all his sporting and academic achievements, while he stood there grinning inanely. Inevitably you would prefer one of his younger siblings.

Talking to Baettig afterwards, he agreed the word “icon” is overused, and that it is certainly not up to the creator to decide what is or isn’t iconic. “All I’m trying to do is make the best wines I can from the terroir we have,” he explained.

Chile has been called a viticultural paradise where the vines can be planted directly into the soil and grow under cloudless, blue skies. In this dry, pristine environment many vineyards are naturally organic. The best are given just enough water through drip irrigation to force the roots to dig deep into the soil.

But is it all too perfect? With the exception of the extraordinary Vinedo Chadwick, which comes from a ploughed-up polo field near Santiago, I found the wines almost too vivid, though maybe they just need time in the bottle to soften their intense purity of fruit. n