Qualla: Garibaldi, Rio Grande do Sul

Garibaldi, Rio Grande do Sul: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elisandra Leite, CC BY-SA 3.0. The bottles come out of the cellars with a sound this town knows well - the soft pop of a cork, the rush of bubbles. Garibaldi is the capital of sparkling wine in Brazil, and it earned the name the hard way, one harvest at a time, on steep green hills first planted by Italian immigrants who arrived with vine cuttings in their luggage. The town itself carries the name of a revolutionary: Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian who, decades before this colony existed, had ridden into these very southern lands to fight - and whose Brazilian wife, Anita, fought beside him.

Image: Elisandra Leite | CC BY-SA 3.0

Garibaldi, Rio Grande do Sul: A Colony for a Prince, a Name for a Rebel

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Guarnieri Lucas, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 th...

Image: Guarnieri Lucas | CC BY-SA 4.0

Garibaldi, Rio Grande do Sul: The Italians Who Brought the Vine

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ricardosdag, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 immigra...

Image: Ricardosdag | CC BY-SA 4.0

Garibaldi, Rio Grande do Sul: Where Brazil Learned to Make Bubbles

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ricardo Melo Araujo, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ...

Image: Ricardo Melo Araujo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Garibaldi, Rio Grande do Sul: An Italian Heart Beating in the South

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FrancoBras, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

Image: FrancoBras | CC BY-SA 3.0