The settlement began in 1870 as the Colônia Conde d'Eu, named for the French nobleman who had married Princess Isabel, heir to the Brazilian throne. The land was rugged and unwanted, and the government, unwilling to invest in roads, simply hoped European settlers could tame it themselves. The first arrivals, in July 1870, were Prussians. They lived by subsistence farming on terrible roads, joined over the next years by Swiss, French, Austrian, and Polish families. When the colony was finally raised to a municipality on October 31, 1900, it shed the prince's name for a fighter's. It became Garibaldi - honoring the man who, in the 1830s, had joined the Farrapos rebels of the Ragamuffin War in their fight for a southern republic, and his wife Anita, born in Brazil, who rode into battle at his side.

By far the largest wave of settlers came from Italy, most of them from the Veneto in the country's north, and this colony was the first nucleus of Italian settlement in the highlands of Rio Grande do Sul. A community of just 720 in 1875 was growing fast, and from 1890 the immigrants raised the stone houses and shops that still form the town's Historical Center today. With them came an inheritance more valuable than any deed: the grapevine. The hills here, too rugged for easy farming, turned out to be very good for grapes. Vineyards climbed the slopes, and wine wove itself into the fabric of the regional economy - the daily craft of families who had been making it for generations in the old country.

Still wine was only the beginning. In 1913 a Garibaldi immigrant named Manuel Peterlongo produced the first Brazilian sparkling wine, and two years later founded the winery that bears his name - the start of an entire national industry. The bubbles took hold. Garibaldi grew into the leading producer of sparkling wine in Brazil, its name now a byword for the drink itself. The town built a tourist route around it, the Rota dos Espumantes, where visitors move from winery to winery tasting the country's most celebrated sparkling wines and watching, cellar by cellar, how the bottles are made. A drink the world associates with France found a second home on these Brazilian hills.

Garibaldi feels, in many ways, like a piece of northern Italy transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere. Almost everyone in town descends from those immigrant families, and the culture they carried over the ocean still flavors daily life - the food, the festivals, the dialects, the devotion to the vine. The town's bond with Italy is formal as well as cultural: Garibaldi is twinned with Conegliano, a wine town in the Veneto, the very region most of its founders left behind. The connection runs both ways across more than a century and an ocean. The vineyards on the slopes, the stone houses in the old center, the bottles cooling in the cellars - all of it tells the same story of people who left one wine country and, with patience and bare hands, built another.