Wineries and wine routes in Brazil

The southern wine country, settled largely by Italian immigrants, is the one most visitors mean. Its harvest falls in the southern summer, and a visit during it is a different thing from a visit outside it — outside, you are looking at vines and a cellar.

The north-eastern valley works on another logic entirely: irrigation and heat let the same vine be harvested more than once in a year, so there is no single season to plan around.

What goes in this category

Wine regions and what a visit involves in each:

• The southern wine routes, and what the harvest months change.
• The north-eastern valley, where the calendar does not work the way you expect.
• What a winery visit includes, and what is a tasting versus a tour.
• Combining wine with the rest of a trip, since neither region is close to a beach.

How to choose inside it

Decide whether you are going for the harvest or for the landscape, because they are different trips at different times of year. Then check opening days: many properties are small, receive by appointment and do not open every day of the week.

The calendar of the vine

In the southern region the vine follows the classic temperate cycle: dormancy in winter, pruning, budburst in spring and harvest in the southern summer. That splits the year into two different trips. During harvest the property is working, there is a smell of fermentation and movement in the yard. Outside it the visit is calmer and more explanatory, and in winter the vines are bare.

In the irrigated valley of the north-east the logic is different: with constant heat and irrigation in place of rainfall, the plant does not go dormant in the same way and production is staggered through the year. There is therefore no single harvest window to plan around — what you gain in flexibility you lose in knowing in advance what will be going on.

Before choosing a date it is worth deciding which of the two trips you want, because they do not happen at the same time in the same place.

The question of who drives

Wine country is rural and spread out, and that creates a logistical problem no other category has in quite the same way:

• Properties sit a few kilometres apart, connected by secondary roads.
• Tasting and driving do not mix, which is exactly why several regions have organised transport.
• Three properties in a day is a comfortable maximum; the fourth becomes a queue of tastings nobody remembers.
• Many receive visitors by appointment only and are not open every day of the week.

Taking bottles home

Much of what you taste in these regions is small production that never reaches shelves in other states, which makes the bottle bought on site the only chance of drinking it at home. Bottles travel badly, though: they break in unprotected checked luggage and they fall under the liquid rules in the cabin. It is worth deciding how much space the suitcase has before the trip rather than sorting it out at the airport counter.

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