South America

South America

Winemaking arrived in the New World with Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.

From Mexico, where viticulture was first established in the Americas, the vine spread southward through other Spanish colonies, from Peru to Chile and Argentina by 1560. The Portuguese brought the vine to Brazil as early as 1532. Whether Spanish Catholics and missionaries hold responsibility for propagation of the vine, or colonists were simply interested in preserving a staple of their old lives, viticulture flourished in most of South America. However, despite promising early origins, South American viticulture suffered under a prohibitive 17th century Spanish law that restricted wine production (unrelated to the Church) in the New World in favor of Iberian producers. While some nascent wine-producing colonies were hindered by Spanish calls to uproot their vineyards, others, such as Chile, did their best to ignore the ban on production. The matter was settled definitively as the early 1800s brought a new era of political autonomy to former colonies, and Argentina, Chile, and Brazil (South America’s three leading wine producers) gained independence, though not without a great degree of turbulence and strife. An influx of European immigration in the 19th century, along with the development of a national rail system, resulted in a rapid expansion of viticulture in Argentina. Chile also benefited from European expertise: in 1830 the Frenchman Claudio Gay set up a Chilean repository of pre-phylloxera Vitis vinifera vines at the University of Chile’s Quinta Normal department. These vine specimens served Chile well; its geographic isolation, due to the Andes, prevented phylloxera from entering the country. Today, Chile is the only major winemaking country to remain totally phylloxera-free; in the late 1800s the country was able to capitalize on Europe’s vineyard devastation