Brazilian Celebration Not Exactly Vintage Italian

Southern Brazil is celebrating its Italian heritage this month with street fairs, parades and some healthy gloating over an Oscar-nominated film portraying the struggles of its immigrant forebears.

But the greatest legacy of these early Italian settlers, the Brazilian wine industry, is in steady decline.

A flood of cheap imports, high production costs and falling world demand have eaten away at Brazil’s once-prosperous wine industry.

The small farmers who supplied winemakers with grapes over the past 120 years are uprooting their vineyards and turning them over to kiwi, peach and apple cultivation to survive amid the changes.

“Italians in this region grew up with grapes for generations, but now we’re pulling up all our vines. You can’t even keep up with the number of farmers who have given up on grapes,” said Leonardo Boff, uncertain how much longer he will be farming his aunt’s 30-acre vineyard outside Caxias do Sul, the capital of Brazil’s wine industry in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul.

In the mid-1980s, just before the industry began its steady decline, Brazil was producing about 1.1 billion pounds of wine grapes a year. Farmers say they will be lucky to get 660 million pounds this year.

Chief among the causes for the diminishing output has been a surge in cheap imported wines, mostly from Germany, which have stolen the hearts of Brazilian consumers.

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Thanks to the lifting of high tariffs on foreign wine in recent years, imports now account for 40% of wine sales in Brazil and industry observers expect that figure to grow.

Brazilian winemakers boast that their product is better than most imported wines. But they complain their countrymen, not known for an appreciation of good wine, have been taken in by clever German marketers.

One of the most successful tools of German distributors has been to market wine in cobalt blue bottles, which Brazilians have gone mad over.

De Lantier, a Brazilian winemaker, said it tripled the sales of one of its wines simply by changing the color of its bottles from red to blue.

But few think the cure for Brazil’s moribund wine industry lies in blue bottles. Many say there is simply no way to reverse what they see as the industry’s inevitable decline.

“It would be almost impossible for farmers to regain previous production levels at this point,” said Jaime Luiz Lovatel, an agronomist for Rio Grande do Sul’s Agriculture Secretariat.

Lovatel noted that geographic and climatic hurdles, which have always burdened the industry, have created insurmountable problems in today’s competitive global wine market.

When Italians first arrived in southern Brazil in the mid-1870s, drawn by terrain reminiscent of southern Europe, they cluttered the region’s sloping hills with thousands of small vineyards.

Although bouts of heavy rain and a lack of steady sunshine made the area particularly unfriendly to wine production, the settlers’ hard work and perseverance won out and the region was soon producing 95% of Brazil’s domestic wine.

Decades of government protection also ensured a market for the wine, whose quality never compared with wines from neighboring Chile and Argentina.

Today, when a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of wine grapes fetches just 15 cents and world consumption has fallen back to levels of the 1960s, vineyards worldwide have had to become more efficient to survive. Mechanized grape harvesting has become standard in Italy, France and California and is being adopted in Argentina.

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Unlike the vast vineyards of Europe and California, most of Brazil’s vineyards are small and family run, averaging just 35 acres. Because of their small farms, Brazilian growers have little access to credit to modernize production.

Caxias do Sul’s hilly terrain also precludes the use of mechanized picking equipment even at most of the larger vineyards.

In desperation, the area’s wine makers and grape growers are asking the government to reimpose hefty tariffs on imported wines to save the industry. But few expect the reform-minded government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to reverse Brazil’s slow but steady trot toward trade liberalization.

Despite the bleak future, producers put on happy faces this month to take part in Caxias do Sul’s Grape Festival, a three-week celebration held every two to three years.

The theme of this year’s Grape Festival is “120 Years of Italian Immigration” to southern Brazil.

Townspeople, eager to discuss their Italian lineage, are fond of telling outsiders how they offered their homes and labor to keep production costs low for the filming of the Brazilian movie “O Quatrilho,” a romance set in the late 19th century that portrays the struggles of two Italian couples settling in southern Brazil. It was nominated as best foreign film by Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.