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Free Bacchus Country Guide·Chile
Most Chilean wine grows in a long trough between the Andes and a lower coastal range, with a cold ocean just beyond. Rain comes in winter, while the vines are bare. A French grape lived here for generations under another name, and one the Spanish brought in the 1500s is still dry-farmed in the southern hills.
What this guide is for
A country at a time: the major wine regions of the world, what the ground and the weather do to what is grown in them, and which growers inside them we have verified. None of it is settled. Growing seasons are shifting, and the chemistry most vineyards reach for to hold steady against that is made from fossil fuels and takes energy to manufacture — while a warmer, wetter season brings more disease, and more disease brings more spraying. Every estate on these pages farms without synthetic pesticides. That is what their certification means, and it is the part we check.
The ground
Chile is a strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific, and its wine grows in the long trough down the middle, between the Andes and a lower coastal range, and on the slopes either side. The cold Humboldt Current runs up the coast, and in central Chile the rain falls mostly in winter. The vine register kept by SAG, the national agriculture and livestock service, counted 126,250 hectares of wine and pisco grapes in 2024, 5.5 per cent fewer than a year before and the latest step in a gradual decline since 2015. The O’Higgins and Maule regions hold two thirds of it, and Cabernet Sauvignon is 27 per cent of the wine grapes.
The year a Chilean ‘Merlot’ was named Carménère1994
Phylloxera, the root louse behind Europe’s vineyard crisis in the nineteenth century, is on Chile’s official list of pests absent from the country, so vines here can still grow on their own roots. Carménère, a French grape that probably came over before that crisis, was taken for Merlot until November 1994, when the ampelographer Jean-Michel Boursiquot saw it in a Chilean vineyard and named it.
Both old grapes are still here. SAG first recorded Carménère in 1997, at 330 hectares, and counted 9,517 in 2024. País, the grape the Spanish brought in the middle of the sixteenth century, still covers 10,347 hectares, almost all of it in Maule, Ñuble and Biobío, and more than three quarters of it is unirrigated bush vines. The organic layer is newer and thinner. SAG recorded 3,360 hectares of certified organic wine grapes in 2018 and 5,776 in 2023, about 4.6 per cent of that year’s wine-grape vineyard. That was 12 per cent down on 2022, which ODEPA, the agriculture ministry’s policy office, put down mainly to the world drinking less wine, and SAG does not say whether land still in conversion is counted.
Hectares of wine grapes certified organic in 20235,776
A certificate here is read for exactly what it covers. Some of these estates certify their wine as made with organic grapes, a category that allows added sulphites and cannot be labelled organic. Cono Sur keeps its organic vines in a company of their own, apart from the winery, and Lapostolle gave up a biodynamic certificate it had held since 2011. Each card says what its certificate reaches, and the estate’s own page says it at length.
Region by region
The valley just south of Santiago, running from the Andes foothills at Pirque out through Buin, Paine and Isla de Maipo towards Melipilla. The Santiago Metropolitan Region had 8,898 hectares of wine grapes in 2024, and more than half of it was Cabernet Sauvignon. Antiyal farms here, organically and biodynamically.
3 verified producers here.
Under the 1994 decree Colchagua is a zone of the Rapel Valley, and much the larger of its two: 24,344 hectares of vineyard with a denomination of origin in 2024, against 8,644 in Cachapoal. The decree names two places inside it, Apalta and Los Lingues, and the estates on this page are spread from one side of it to the other: Koyle at Los Lingues in the Andes foothills, Lapostolle at Apalta, Cono Sur at Chimbarongo, Emiliana at Los Robles, and Hacienda Araucano at Lolol, forty kilometres from the Pacific. More estates are verified here than in any other region on this page.
5 verified producers here.
Maule is the largest wine region in Chile. The administrative region, which also takes in Curicó, had 48,565 hectares of wine grapes in 2024, about two fifths of the country’s, and 12,963 of them were Cabernet Sauvignon. In the dry hills of the coastal range, 5,910 hectares of País survive, more than half of Chile’s, and the law gives País and Cinsault from these unirrigated areas a denomination of their own, Secano Interior.
2 verified producers here.
On the road from Santiago to the port of Valparaíso, and the valley that led Chile towards cooler vineyards near the coast. Mornings often start in fog off the ocean, and it is one of Chile’s leading white-wine valleys. The valley is a single municipality, with 4,386 hectares of vineyard with a denomination of origin in 2024, and the decree lets its wines carry the word Costa on the label, for the Pacific’s influence.
No verified producer here yet.
The valley shares its name with its river and with the highest mountain in the Americas, which stands just across the border in Argentina. Under the 1994 decree Aconcagua is also the name of a whole wine region that takes in Casablanca and San Antonio. The valley itself is small, 1,233 hectares of vineyard with a denomination of origin in 2024, around Quillota, Hijuelas, Panquehue and San Felipe.
No verified producer here yet.
Just inland from the port of San Antonio, and the region on this page closest to the Pacific. It has three sectors, Leyda, Lo Abarca and Rosario, and most of its 2,025 hectares of vineyard with a denomination of origin are in Leyda. The soils are thin and rocky and the fog comes in off the sea. Matetic farms its hillsides here under organic and Demeter biodynamic certificates.
1 verified producer here.
In the hills inland from Concepción, south of the Central Valley wine region, and a different kind of vineyard from the rest of this page. In Ñuble, the region the Itata vineyards lie in, 8,626 of 10,323 hectares of wine grapes were dry-farmed in 2024, and about three quarters were bush vines rather than vines trained on wires. País and Cinsault from here can carry the Secano Interior denomination.
1 verified producer here.
Aconcagua to Itata is about four hundred and forty kilometres in a straight line, all of it between the Andes and the Pacific.
Twelve estates, four of the twelve at Gold and ten of the twelve on Track A. Five hold a Demeter biodynamic certificate as well as an organic one, though not always for every vineyard. Each card gives the certificate and what it covers.
Gold
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SilverChile kept what Europe lost in the nineteenth century: vines on their own roots, and a French grape that survived here under the wrong name. None of that says how a vineyard is farmed now, and the certified organic share is still under one hectare in twenty. That is the part this guide reads, one certificate at a time, and where a certificate stops short, the card says so.
Chile's total planted vineyard in 2024 was 126,249.6 hectares of wine and pisco grapes (116,962.2 wine varieties, 9,287.4 pisco), about 7,418 hectares or 5.5 per cent less than in 2023, continuing a gradual decline from 2015; O'Higgins and Maule hold 67.0 per cent of the national area, and Maule 48,565 hectares, about 41.5 per cent of wine varieties; Cabernet Sauvignon is 32,089.2 hectares, 27 per cent of wine varieties, and Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon Blanc, País and Carménère together cover 56 per cent; the Valle Central wine region holds 82.1 per cent of the area with a denomination of origin. Version 2.0 of the report, which corrects the Metropolitana figure to 8,897.8 hectares (Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero, Catastro Vitícola Nacional 2024, informe ejecutivo v2.0)
sag.gob.cl ↗Valley and zone areas in 2024, Decreto 464 varieties only: Colchagua zone 24,344.1 ha, Cachapoal 8,643.9, Maipo 8,535.1 (led by Isla de Maipo, Buin, Paine, Melipilla and Pirque), Casablanca 4,385.7, San Antonio 2,024.8 (Leyda zone 1,855.8), Aconcagua 1,233.1 (Quillota, Hijuelas, Panquehue, San Felipe). By administrative region: Carménère 9,516.7 ha nationally; País 10,346.6 ha, of which Maule 5,909.9, Ñuble 3,698.5 and Biobío 590.9; 7,954.1 ha of País are both dry-farmed (secano) and head-trained (cabeza); Ñuble has 8,625.9 ha dry-farmed and 7,921.0 ha head-trained of 10,322.7 ha; Cabernet Sauvignon is 4,803.9 ha of the Metropolitana's 8,897.8 and 12,963.0 ha in Maule (Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero and ODEPA, Catastro Vitícola 2024 viewer, tabs Por Valle - Variedad and Por Tipo de riego - Conducción)
apps.odepa.gob.cl ↗Certified organic wine grapes (uva vinífera) in Chile: 3,360 ha in 2018, 3,507 in 2019, 4,408 in 2020, 6,534 in 2022 and 5,776 in 2023, a fall of 12 per cent on 2022 that ODEPA attributes mainly to lower wine consumption worldwide; compiled by ODEPA from Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero data. The tables do not say whether area in conversion is included. 5,776 ha is about 4.6 per cent of the 124,436.2 ha of wine varieties in the 2023 catastro, our arithmetic (ODEPA, Agricultura orgánica: actualización del sector, December 2024)
odepa.gob.cl ↗The 2023 catastro recorded 124,436.2 hectares of wine-grape varieties, the denominator for the organic share above (Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero, Catastro Vitícola Nacional 2023, informe ejecutivo)
sag.gob.cl ↗Viteus (=Daktulosphaira) vitifoliae, phylloxera, on Vitis spp. is listed among the quarantine pests absent from Chile's national territory, island and mainland (Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero, Resolución Exenta 7787/2025)
sag.gob.cl ↗"A key factor that distinguishes Chile from most other wine-producing countries is its phylloxera-free status. This condition has allowed the country to maintain vineyards planted on their own roots" (Peña-Neira et al., Plants 15(3):359, 2026, CC BY 4.0)
ebi.ac.uk ↗Carmenère is a red wine cultivar that spread, unrecorded, from France to other countries; it probably arrived in Chile before the phylloxera crisis in Europe, and there remained confused with Merlot and other red cultivars until the mid 1990s (Moncada and Hinrichsen, Vitis 46(4):174-180, 2007)
ojs.openagrar.de ↗Jean-Michel Boursiquot recounts identifying Carmenère in November 1994, in a plot shown to him at Viña Carmen as new Merlot (Julien Boulard MW, Decanter China, 21 June 2016)
decanterchina.com ↗DNA typing of 93 vines from five Chilean vineyards planted as Merlot matched each to either Merlot or Carmenère (Hinrichsen et al., American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 52:396-399, 2001)
ajevonline.org ↗Carménère first appears in Chile's planted-area register in 1997, at 330 hectares, blank in 1994 to 1996 (Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero, Catastro Vitícola 2022, cuadro 56)
bibliotecadigital.odepa.gob.cl ↗País is the old Spanish cultivar Listán Prieto, grown across the Americas as País, Criolla Chica, Misión and Mission (Milla-Tapia et al., American Journal of Enology and Viticulture 58(2):242-251, 2007)
ajevonline.org ↗The uva negra, later called uva país, was brought by the Spanish who settled in the Kingdom of Chile in the middle of the sixteenth century (Lacoste et al., Mundo Agrario 10(20), 2010)
mundoagrario.unlp.edu.ar ↗Decreto 464 of 1994 sets Chile's wine zoning: the Aconcagua wine region takes in the Aconcagua, Casablanca and San Antonio valleys, San Antonio containing the Leyda zone; Rapel contains the Cachapoal and Colchagua zones, and Colchagua the areas of Apalta and Los Lingues; Itata is in the Región del Sur; Art. 3 bis creates the Secano Interior denomination for País and Cinsault from named dry-farmed areas; Art. 5 bis allows Andes, Entre Cordilleras and Costa on the label, and names Casablanca for Costa (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional, Ley Chile)
bcn.cl ↗Chile's relief has four units: coastal plains, the Coastal Range, the Intermediate Depression between the Coastal Range and the Andes, and the Andes (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional, Chile Nuestro País: Relieve)
bcn.cl ↗Chile's climate is shaped by the Coastal and Andean ranges, the cold Humboldt Current and the Pacific Anticyclone; central Chile has temperate climates with rain concentrated in winter (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional, Chile Nuestro País: Clima y vegetación)
bcn.cl ↗Casablanca is Chile's pioneering cool-climate region, with Pacific maritime influence and cool morning fog, and one of its leading white-wine producers; San Antonio has three sectors, Leyda, Lo Abarca and Rosario, with thin, rocky soils from its closeness to the Pacific (Wines of Chile, Winegrowing regions)
winesofchile.org ↗Pesticides are overwhelmingly derived from fossil fuels and their manufacture is energy-intensive, and a warming climate raises pest and disease pressure, which raises pesticide use in turn
pan-uk.org ↗The loop between the two: emissions from pesticide manufacture and use contribute to warming, and warming drives further pesticide use
panna.org ↗