Brazil
A humid southern highland making good traditional-method sparkling wine, and a tropical vineyard with two harvests a year.
Most Brazilian wine comes from Serra Gaúcha in Rio Grande do Sul, settled by Italian immigrants from the 1870s. It is humid and rains during the harvest, which is the central problem, and it is why so much of the vineyard is American and hybrid varieties that resist disease. Sparkling wine is the strongest category: the acidity that the climate leaves in the fruit suits a base wine, and Brazilian traditional-method sparkling is consistently good and inexpensive.
Vale dos Vinhedos, within Serra Gaúcha, became Brazil's first legal denomination in 2012 and is the country's quality centre for still wine, mostly merlot and chardonnay.
The Vale do São Francisco, near the ninth parallel in the arid north east, is a genuine curiosity: a tropical vineyard where irrigation and pruning control the cycle rather than the seasons, and where a vine can be cropped twice in a year. Quality is mixed, but it is one of very few commercial vineyards anywhere near the equator.
What the label says
- DODenominação de Origem
- Vale dos Vinhedos, granted in 2012, and Altos de Pinto Bandeira.
- IPIndicação de Procedência
- The wider indication tier.
Signature grapes
our choiceKey regions
1 records- Serra Gaúcha
- Vale dos Vinhedos
- Campanha
- Serra do Sudeste
- Vale do São Francisco
- Santa Catarina
A dashed outline is a region we describe but do not yet hold a page for.
Planting snapshot
2015 observations, OIV 2017 study- Isabella
- about 13,000 ha
- Niagara Rosada
- about 11,000 ha
- Bordo
- about 10,000 ha
- Italia
- about 9,000 ha
- Niagara Branca
- about 3,000 ha
- Concord
- about 2,000 ha
- Alphonse Lavallée
- about 2,000 ha
- Couderc Noir
- about 2,000 ha
- Jacquez
- about 1,000 ha
- Cabernet Sauvignon
- about 1,000 ha
The ten largest varieties reported in OIV’s historical study, including wine, table and drying grapes. Figures are rounded and do not describe the current vineyard.
Protected wine names
1 in the EU registerWorth knowing
- Traditional-method sparkling is Brazil's strongest category.
- Vale do São Francisco is tropical and can crop twice a year.
- Much of the national vineyard is American and hybrid varieties grown for juice and table use.
More in South America
Sources
The description, the reading of the classification system and the choice of signature grapes are ours. Region and grape records are built from Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia infoboxes (CC BY-SA 4.0). American AVA boundaries come from the TTB (public domain).
- Historical variety plantings: OIV, Distribution of the world's grapevine varieties (2017).
- Protected names: European Commission, eAmbrosia.