Uruguay
A small, humid, Atlantic wine country that adopted a grape France had almost given up on.
Tannat came to Uruguay from Madiran in south west France in 1870 and is now the national grape, at around a quarter of the vineyard. In France it is famously severe, so tannic that producers use micro-oxygenation to soften it. In Uruguay, on clay soils under a humid Atlantic sky, it ripens more completely and gives a darker, rounder wine that still has real grip.
The climate is the opposite of Argentina's or Chile's: humid, rainy, maritime, with the Río de la Plata and the Atlantic on two sides. That brings disease pressure and forces careful canopy work, but it also gives moderate ripeness and lower alcohol than the rest of South America. Maldonado, on the Atlantic coast, is the cooler frontier and makes fine albariño alongside tannat.
The scale is small and the domestic market drinks most of it. Uruguayans consume more wine per head than any other country in the Americas, which supports a large number of small family wineries rather than a few exporters.
What the label says
- VCPVino de Calidad Preferente
- The quality tier, marked by a band on the neck.
- IGIndicación Geográfica
- Departmental and sub-departmental origins.
Signature grapes
our choiceKey regions
- Canelones
- Montevideo
- Maldonado
- Colonia
- Salto
- Rivera
A dashed outline is a region we describe but do not yet hold a page for.
Worth knowing
- Tannat is the national grape and comes from Madiran in France.
- The climate is humid and Atlantic, not desert like Argentina and Chile.
- Maldonado albariño is the country's rising white.
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).