Melchor de Santiago Concha y Toro was no farmer when he founded the winery in 1883. He was a former Chilean Minister of Finance, a man of the Santiago aristocracy who married Emiliana Subercaseaux and decided to plant something lasting in the soil south of the capital. Rather than rely on local stock, he sent to France for cuttings from the great châteaux of Bordeaux: Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, Sémillon, Merlot, and Carménère. That last grape would prove unexpectedly important. Long believed extinct in its French homeland after phylloxera, Carménère survived quietly in Chilean vineyards, often mistaken for Merlot, until it was rediscovered and embraced as the country's signature red.

The legend was a sales tool before anyone called it marketing. Don Melchor spread the rumor of strange nocturnal happenings, and superstition did the rest. In 1966 the company turned the story into a brand, Casillero del Diablo, and the gamble paid off on a global scale. Today it is one of the most powerful wine brands in the world, poured in more than 130 countries and familiar to football fans as a longtime sponsor of major European clubs. The ultra-premium Don Melchor, named for the founder, followed in 1987 and put Chilean wine on the same tables as the Bordeaux that inspired it.

The heart of the operation sits at Pirque, in the Santiago Metropolitan Region, where vineyards spread toward the foothills of the Andes and the roads carry names from another century: Marqués de Casa Concha, Conde de la Conquista. These are not decorations. They are inherited titles, and the family ties to Chilean nobility are still living. The company's directors have included the Marquess of Casa Concha, the diplomat Mariano Fontecilla de Santiago-Concha, a great-grandson of the founder. Control has long rested with the Guilisasti and Larraín families, binding a publicly traded company worth millions of cases a year to a lineage that predates Chilean independence.

From that single cellar, Concha y Toro has grown into a giant. It sells tens of millions of cases each year, owns vineyards across Chile and Argentina, and reached north into California with the purchase of Fetzer Vineyards. The estate at Pirque now draws visitors who come to walk the rows, taste the Cabernet, and step into the original cellar where guides retell the story of the devil with a showman's relish. The wine is real and excellent. The devil was always a fiction. Together they built an empire.