The Next Best Wine Destination is in Southern Brazil’s Little Italy
For the 150-year-old Italian community in southern Brazil’s Serra Gaúcha mountains, wine is both a nod to the past and a promise for the future.
By Shannon G. Sims
Photographs by Rose Marie Cromwell
Chintzy porcelain cats and angels populate a glass cabinet. Faded family photos and Catholic iconography dot the walls. It’s not my nonna’s home in Veneto, Italy, but it looks just like it. I’m actually in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil — a rural southern region where, if you blink, you are transported back to Italia.
The wood cabin lies off a road that winds up and down the low-topped, forest-covered Serra Gaúcha mountains, just north of the town of Bento Gonçalves. It belonged to Roberto Cainelli Jr.’s grandmother, and it remains just as it was when she and her sister lived here. Since her death in 2000, the only thing that’s changed is that everything has been labeled: The Cainelli home is now an Italian heritage museum. “We realized that a lot of people might be interested in seeing how the immigrants lived,” 30-year-old Cainelli explains, patting a mattress filled with dried corn husks. Cainelli is a fifth-generation Italian Brazilian, the great-great-grandson of one of many Italian immigrants who boarded a boat to Rio Grande do Sul more than a century ago.
Usually when people think of Brazil, they think of the Southern Atlantic, with the dollops of mountain that make up Rio de Janeiro, or the bright yellow jerseys of the Brazilian national soccer team. (Or bikini waxes and blowouts.) Few think of this pocket of Brazil, rich with Italian culture. Cainelli hopes to change that — with wine.
Cainelli’s family members are winemakers. Just outside his nonna’s home, grapevines lie dormant, waiting for the harvest in January, January being the height of summer in South America. Cainelli wines include Proseccos and Cabernets, which are sold throughout the region. But the Cainelli family is not unique. All across the Serra Gaúcha, Italian families have long been making wine — some of them speaking Italian dialect as they do it.
Today, Brazil is the fifth-largest wine producer in the Southern Hemisphere, after countries like Chile and Argentina, and around 90 percent of Brazil’s wine is produced in the Serra Gaúcha. Brazilian wines, especially the sparkling ones like Moscatels and Proseccos, have won numerous awards, and bottles from the area’s biggest producers, such as Casa Valduga and Salton, are stocked on American shelves. At the National Wine Festival of Brazil in the country’s “wine capital,” Bento Gonçalves, I could barely squeeze past the puffy coats of the record crowds — 250,000 attendees over ten days — to visit Cainelli’s booth and taste his homemade Brut.
Despite the country’s economic recession, it’s a remarkably optimistic moment for this region and the Brazilians of Italian heritage here who have dedicated themselves to wine. Surprisingly so. That wine would lift anyone out of poverty is something their great-grandparents never would have imagined, a stunning outcome of a migration story a lot of people don’t know anything about.
In 1831, newly independent Brazil was led by a five-year-old Portuguese boy. Nine years after freeing Brazil from Portugal and establishing an empire, Pedro I returned to Portugal, leaving his son, Pedro II, in charge. With a figurehead as leader, Brazil struggled to establish itself. The country fought off a series of civil wars, slave revolts, and secession movements as it transitioned from colony to empire. To fortify the monarchy against invasion, Brazil decided to develop its southern territories. First the government tried attracting Germans; thousands immigrated between the 1820s and the 1870s. (To this day, some towns in Brazil’s southernmost state, such as São Leopoldo and Novo Hamburgo, retain a strong German heritage — the same one that gave us Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen.) But building a new life in the hot, forested lands while warding off attacks by indigenous tribes was challenging, and the number of Germans emigrating dwindled. The Portuguese had to look elsewhere for desperate people willing to board a boat to the unknown.
They found them in Italy. After decades of conflict and negotiation, in 1861, Italy finally sutured together its various kingdoms and duchies thanks to the rabble-rousing of revolutionary leader Giuseppe Garibaldi (one of the central towns in the Serra Gaúcha is named after him). But the country was still devastatingly poor. Italians left home in droves — 8 million in 30 years — for places like the United States, Argentina, and Uruguay. Many Italians from southern areas like Campania and Sicily went to the United States. Brazil, meanwhile, focused its recruitment on Italians from the north, from Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, and Trento. Visiting the sophisticated northern cities of Milan, Turin, and Venice today, it’s hard to imagine how life there could have driven someone across the ocean, but the Brazilian government estimates that between 1875 and 1914, around 80,000 Italians arrived in Rio Grande do Sul. “It was a group of Italians who were poor, and they thought they would be welcomed here,” historian Cleodes Maria Piazza Julio Ribeiro told me. “On the contrary; they ended up parked on the edge of a river, stuck in the middle of the jungle. They didn’t even know where they were.”
What the first few northerners found when they landed in Brazil was a hot, rocky environment unlike anything they’d known in Italy. Rainstorms, gigantic insects, screeching monkeys, and dense jungle greeted them. Panicked, they climbed into the low-lying mountains of southern Brazil, seeking a more familiar climate, something similar to where they’d come from, just south of the Alps. To some extent they got lucky; the Serra Gaúcha is one of the coldest regions in Brazil. Here they began working the land and planting what they needed: wheat for pasta, corn for polenta, tomato for sauces. And because they were Italian, they made sure to also plant grapes for another necessity: wine.
“Those grapevines are 120 years old — can you believe it?” 79-year-old Remy Valduga tells me, with the clip of an Italian accent in his Portuguese. Valduga is the man everyone here points to as the historian of Serra Gaúcha winemaking, and when I visit him on a chilly sunny day, he’s sitting at his kitchen table, staring at his home vineyard. Many of the Italians who emigrated to Brazil brought grape seedlings. “The weak seedlings couldn’t survive the heat,” Valduga tells me. “They pretty much all died.” In the late 19th century, some of the immigrants began trekking south to find hardier grape seedlings that could survive a warmer climate. Soon, immigrants like Valduga’s grandparents had their first functioning vineyards.
Families like the Valdugas are spread across this countryside. Down a winding, muddy path in the middle of the forest I find the Flamia family cabin. Diva Flamia starts shouting before I even open my car door. “Welcome! The tangerines are ripe! Look at all the lemons, too! Just in time for your visit!” Soon she’s tearing bright orange tangerines from a tree in her front yard and pushing them into my cradled arms. A plump green and blue parrot laughs at me from the mango tree. “Basta!” Diva scolds it and ushers me inside to try her wine.
Diva grew up speaking Venetian dialect with her parents — her mother never learned proper Portuguese — and today her Portuguese still tends toward the staccato thanks to the clip-clop of an Italian accent. The Flamias say “Esteto bem?” as a greeting, a blend of Venetian dialect with Portuguese. Outside the backyard shed, the sour scent of grape fermentation hints at what’s going on inside. Diva isn’t trying to compete with Casa Valduga or Salton; she’s just making wine for her own family and occasionally selling the extra at the local fair. Visit Italy and you’ll find countless families like the Flamias. After an hour of salami tasting and wine sipping, I stand up to leave, and Diva stops me. “Won’t you stay for dinner? We’re making polenta.”
Wandering through the Serra Gaúcha today, the Italian heritage is visible in more expected places, too, like a massive Catholic church in the center of Bento Gonçalves that is shaped like a wine barrel and serves Salton wine during communion, and a chapel that was built during a drought with mortar made from wine instead of water . Many of the old Italians go to these churches, including Cainelli’s 93-year-old great-aunt, whom I am fortunate enough to later meet. Seated in front of a wood-burning stove, she tells me about growing up in the home that’s now been turned into a museum. There was no indoor bathroom, no running water. “We got water from the well,” she explains, before interrupting her train of thought to suggest (as my own nonna might have) that maybe I want to marry Roberto. Cainelli bashfully changes the subject: His great-aunt only got electricity around the time most Americans were listening to disco music. “When she grew up here, it was a pre-Italy,” he tells me. “Italians had electric energy by 1972, but here they didn’t. For many Italian immigrants, it was like they had gone backward in time and had to start all over.”
One cold, rainy evening, about 15 minutes south of Bento Gonçalves in the town of Garibaldi, I found myself blindfolded in the dark, trying to pick up the scent of passionfruit. As part of a “blind tasting” at the Garibaldi Wine Cooperative, a group that buys grapes from local farmers and develops their own blends, I was being asked by my guide whether I could tell if the glass my nose was deep down into was filled with Brut, Prosecco, Demi-Sec, or Moscato. It could have been a tasting class in Italy, except the references were notably more tropical. “Do you smell passionfruit?” the guide asked again. One of the other blindfolded participants piped up. “I smell toasted coconut, but I taste guava and mango.”
The class was a highlight for wine lovers, focusing on a type of wine that this region is slowly becoming famous for: Espumante, or sparkling wine. Over the past decade, local wineries developed unique sparkling wines, using the traditional French technique of hand-turning bottles to create effervescence. “The terroir here is very good for white grapes,” explains Oscar Lo, the president of the Garibaldi Cooperative. So good, it turns out, that Brazilian wines have started to place in international competitions — 2018 in particular was a banner year for Brazilian grapes.
The success, Lo believes, is starting to help address what he calls a “succession problem”: In the past, children of winemakers often moved to the cities, looking for excitement and higher-paying jobs. The Espumantes are changing that. “Here, on a child’s 18th birthday, they bring the cooperative their first batch of grapes in their own name,” he explains. “It’s a way of becoming an adult here.” And when I ask if he thinks at least 50 percent of the cooperative’s farmers are Italian descendants, he laughs. “Fifty percent? More like 98 percent.” One tip-off? “Everyone here uses Italian bad words.”
Argentina is known for its Malbec grapes. Chile, its Carménère. Uruguay, Tannat. Brazil? “Well, I guess there isn’t an emblematic grape in Brazil yet,” says Daniel Salton, a third-generation Italian descendant who guided Salton vineyards over the past decade and turned it into one of the region’s top producers. What Brazil does have are unique blends, like Salton’s recent mix of Tannat and Marselan, a red French grape Salton describes as the “rich cousin of Merlot.”
Brazilians have historically preferred beer or cachaça. But for the thousands who join me at the National Wine Festival in Bento Gonçalves, wine is an excuse to escape the heat and go on an exotic adventure without crossing the border. The woman next to me at Cainelli’s booth got her eyelashes done for the occasion. Sticking her nose into her Cabernet to take a whiff, her lashes dip into her wine. She blinks furiously and scans her white angora sweater for red specks. An hour or so later, I walk back to my car, trailing a woman in a black leather jacket with pastel-pink fur details and a man in a knit beanie, Oakley sunglasses, and a chunky gray scarf that rakes the leaves on the ground. It’s 75 degrees and sunny and I’m starting to sweat, but their jacket and scarf stay on. It might not be the Alps, but around here, it’s as close as you can get.
About the author: Shannon Sims is a freelance journalist whose work appears regularly in the New York Times, the Guardian, and other outlets. She has lived in Brazil for nearly a decade and now splits her time between Rio and New Orleans.
