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No-Fuss Guide · No. 28

The Brazilian wines best rated by those who drank them

What's the best Brazilian wine? The house doesn't crown the best: it shows the ones that the people who drank them rated highest, and explains the math. Below, type by type, the Brazilian labels best rated on X-Wines, only those with 200 ratings or more, at most two per winery. Nobody pays to be here. And the real best is the one you like: found yours outside the list? Go for it, and it's great that you found it.

Reds

The top 10 of the 271 Brazilian reds with 200 ratings or more.

1. Casa Valduga STORIA MerlotSerra Gaúcha · red · Merlot · over R$ 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.41,386 ratings
2. Pizzato DNA 99 Single Vineyard MerlotVale dos Vinhedos · red · Merlot · over R$ 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.41,024 ratings
3. Miolo Lote 43 Cabernet Sauvignon-MerlotVale dos Vinhedos · red · Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot · over R$ 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.23,688 ratings
4. Guaspari Vista de Serra SyrahSerra Negra · red · Syrah · over R$ 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.31,337 ratings
5. Miolo Seival Estate SesmariasCampanha Gaúcha · red · Tannat, Touriga Nacional and 4 morerating ★ 4.5342 ratings
6. Almaúnica Super Premium Quatro Castas BlendVale dos Vinhedos · red · Merlot, Syrah and 2 more · R$ 200 to 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.21,679 ratings
7. Valmarino Churchill Cabernet FrancSerra Gaúcha · red · Cabernet Francrating ★ 4.4468 ratings
8. Almaúnica Parte 2 MerlotVale dos Vinhedos · red · Merlotrating ★ 4.4574 ratings
9. Guaspari Vista do Chá SyrahSão Paulo · red · Syrah · over R$ 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.3709 ratings
10. Don Guerino Traços Red BlendVale dos Vinhedos · red · Malbec, Merlot and 2 morerating ★ 4.4384 ratings

See all Brazilian reds in the search →

Sparkling wines

It's the style where Brazilians most choose the national wine: in 2024, imported sparkling wine had only 18.1% of the market, according to Embrapa. The why is further down.

The top 10 of the 80 Brazilian sparkling wines with 200 ratings or more, leaving out the Moscatels, which have their own list just below.

1. Casa Valduga Maria Valduga Brut Vintage EspumanteSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Chardonnay, Pinot Noir · over R$ 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.4697 ratings
2. Casa Valduga 130 Special Edition Blanc de BlancsSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Chardonnay · R$ 200 to 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.5340 ratings
3. Cave Geisse Terroir NaturePinto Bandeira · sparkling · Chardonnay, Pinot Noir · over R$ 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.4370 ratings
4. Cave Geisse Blanc de Blanc BrutPinto Bandeira · sparkling · Chardonnay · R$ 200 to 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.3514 ratings
5. Valmarino & Churchill Champenoise Natural Extra BrutSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Chardonnay, Pinot Noir · R$ 150 to 200 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.3350 ratings
6. Miolo Millésime BrutSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Chardonnay, Pinot Noirrating ★ 4.1717 ratings
7. Vinícola Hermann Lirica CruaRio Grande do Sul · sparkling · Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and 1 morerating ★ 4.0420 ratings
8. Luiz Argenta Cave Brut 48 MesesSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Chardonnayrating ★ 4.0221 ratings
9. CHANDON Brazil Cuvée Prestige ExcellenceRio Grande do Sul · sparkling · Chardonnay, Pinot Noirrating ★ 3.9282 ratings
10. Vallontano LH ZaniniVale dos Vinhedos · sparkling · Chardonnay, Pinot Noirrating ★ 3.9217 ratings

See all Brazilian sparkling wines in the search →

Moscatel sparkling wine

Moscatel is the perfumed sparkling wine, smelling of grapes, with sugar that stays. The house sorts by the grapes, not by the name on the label: anything with moscatel among its grapes comes here. More about it in the guide to sweet sparkling wine.

The top 6 of the 17 Brazilian Moscatel sparkling wines (the main grape, or in the name) with 200 ratings or more. It is, as a rule, the sweet, fragrant sparkling wine.

1. Casa Perini Espumante MoscatelSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Moscato · R$ 60 to 100 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.12,625 ratings
2. Jolimont MoscatelSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Muscat of Alexandria · R$ 100 to 150 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.3395 ratings
3. Casa Valduga RSV Reserva Moscatel EspumanteVale dos Vinhedos · sparkling · Moscato, Moscato Giallo and 2 morerating ★ 4.3213 ratings
4. Casa Perini Aquarela Moscatel EspumanteSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Moscato Giallo, Moscato Bianco and 1 more · R$ 60 to 100 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.1865 ratings
5. Garibaldi MoscatelSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Moscato · up to R$ 60 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.01,145 ratings
6. Garibaldi Moscatel RoséSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Moscatorating ★ 4.0208 ratings

See the Brazilian Moscatels in the search →

Whites

The top 6 of the 48 Brazilian whites with 200 ratings or more.

1. Casa Valduga Leopoldina Gran ChardonnaySerra Gaúcha · white · Chardonnay · R$ 150 to 200 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.21,388 ratings
2. Pizzato Legno ChardonnayVale dos Vinhedos · white · Chardonnay · R$ 200 to 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.2724 ratings
3. Casa Valduga Terroir GewürztraminerSerra do Sudeste · white · Gewürztraminer · R$ 100 to 150 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.1382 ratings
4. Gazzaro Chardonnay Vinho Fino SecoSerra Gaúcha · white · Chardonnayrating ★ 4.1279 ratings
5. Casa Marques Pereira Segredos da Adega Chardonnay Gran ReservaVale dos Vinhedos · white · Chardonnayrating ★ 4.1232 ratings
6. Almaúnica Super Premium ChardonnayVale dos Vinhedos · white · Chardonnayrating ★ 4.1265 ratings

See all Brazilian whites in the search →

Rosés

The top 5 of the 7 Brazilian rosés with 200 ratings or more. Sparkling rosés are in the sparkling lists.

1. Thera RoséSanta Catarina · rosé · Cabernet Franc, Merlot and 1 more · R$ 200 to 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.1258 ratings
2. Villa Francioni RoséSanta Catarina · rosé · Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and 6 more · R$ 150 to 200 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.0996 ratings
3. Luiz Argenta LA Jovem RoséSerra Gaúcha · rosé · Pinot Noir, Syrah · R$ 150 to 200 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 3.9259 ratings
4. Casa Valduga Naturelle RoséVale dos Vinhedos · rosé · Malvasia, Moscato Bianco and 1 more · R$ 60 to 100 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 3.8774 ratings
5. Miolo Seleção Cabernet Sauvignon-Tempranillo RoséCampanha Gaúcha · rosé · Cabernet Sauvignon, Tempranillo · up to R$ 60 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 3.81,888 ratings

See all Brazilian rosés in the search →

Up to R$ 100 (in Brazil), with a checked price

The top 8, of any style, of the 16 Brazilian wines with 200 ratings or more and a price range checked by the house up to R$ 100 (in Brazil). The range is what the house saw in large stores, in the month shown: the price changes, the range tends to stay.

1. Casa Perini Espumante MoscatelSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Moscato · R$ 60 to 100 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.12,625 ratings
2. Casa Perini Aquarela Moscatel EspumanteSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Moscato Giallo, Moscato Bianco and 1 more · R$ 60 to 100 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.1865 ratings
3. Garibaldi MoscatelSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Moscato · up to R$ 60 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.01,145 ratings
4. Casa Valduga Arte Tradicional Brut EspumanteVale dos Vinhedos · sparkling · Chardonnay, Pinot Noir · R$ 60 to 100 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 3.82,173 ratings
5. Casa Valduga Naturelle RoséVale dos Vinhedos · rosé · Malvasia, Moscato Bianco and 1 more · R$ 60 to 100 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 3.8774 ratings
6. Miolo Seleção Cabernet Sauvignon-Tempranillo RoséCampanha Gaúcha · rosé · Cabernet Sauvignon, Tempranillo · up to R$ 60 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 3.81,888 ratings
7. Aurora Moscatel EspumanteSerra Gaúcha · sparkling · Moscato · up to R$ 60 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 3.81,062 ratings
8. Pizzato Fausto MerlotVale dos Vinhedos · red · Merlot · R$ 60 to 100 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 3.51,294 ratings

See the Brazilian wines up to R$ 100 in the search →

Outside Rio Grande do Sul

Almost all Brazilian wine comes from Rio Grande do Sul, but not all of it. Santa Catarina has vineyards above 840 meters, Minas Gerais harvests in winter and the São Francisco backlands harvest twice a year. The story is further down.

The top 8, of any style, of the 43 wines with 200 ratings or more from outside Rio Grande do Sul.

1. Guaspari Vista de Serra SyrahSerra Negra · red · Syrah · over R$ 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.31,337 ratings
2. Guaspari Vista do Chá SyrahSão Paulo · red · Syrah · over R$ 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.3709 ratings
3. Thera RoséSanta Catarina · rosé · Cabernet Franc, Merlot and 1 more · R$ 200 to 300 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.1258 ratings
4. Villa Francioni TintoSanta Catarina · red · Malbec, Merlot and 2 morerating ★ 4.0584 ratings
5. Villa Francioni RoséSanta Catarina · rosé · Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and 6 more · R$ 150 to 200 (in Brazil), checked Sep 2026rating ★ 4.0996 ratings
6. Vinícola Hiragami Torii Cabernet SauvignonPlanalto Catarinense · red · Cabernet Sauvignonrating ★ 4.0354 ratings
7. Villa Santa Maria Brandina Assemblage Tinto SecoSão Paulo · red · Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and 1 morerating ★ 4.0275 ratings
8. Casa Verrone Speciale SyrahSão Paulo · red · Syrahrating ★ 4.0511 ratings

See the ones from outside Rio Grande do Sul in the search →

Is Brazilian wine good? How the house does the math

The rating is the one from X-Wines, an open scientific database: 21 million ratings from 1 to 5 stars, given by about 1 million people between 2012 and 2021 (de Azambuja, R. X.; Morais, A. J.; Filipe, V., 2023). Each wine's rating combines all its vintages: the bottle from one year can be better or worse than the average.

Only labels with 200 ratings or more get in. With fewer people, a wine's rating sits in the hands of a few.

The order takes into account how many people rated each wine. It is the same calculation as the “Best rating” order in the house search: each wine gets 400 imaginary ratings, all at the world average (3.86). A wine that many people rated barely moves; a wine that few people rated stays closer to the average until it gathers more votes. No wine is removed from the search because of this: only the order changes.

The example from the reds: the Miolo Seival Estate Sesmarias has the highest rating of all, 4.52, from 342 people. The Casa Valduga STORIA Merlot has 4.39, from 1,386 people. With more people confirming it, the second one tops the list, and the first comes in 5th.

Each list has at most two labels from the same winery, so it doesn't turn into one house's list. The Avaliação Nacional de Vinhos (Brazil's National Wine Evaluation), from the Brazilian Association of Enology, goes further: among the 16 it shows the public, at most one per winery. A label goes into only one list by type; the up-to-R$ 100 list and the outside-Rio-Grande-do-Sul list can repeat a name.

On the card, the rating is the plain one, from those who drank it, with the number of ratings below. Nobody pays to get in or to move up.

The house search has 428 Brazilian wines rated by the people who drank them: 272 reds, 97 sparkling, 48 whites, 7 rosés and 4 dessert wines. With 200 ratings or more, 426 make the cut. The middle rating of the Brazilian wines is 3.68; that of the 23,741 wines from around the world in the search, 3.84. On the world scale, 11 Brazilian wines are among the top 10% best rated and 48 among the top 25% (counting those 11).

And the top is pricey: of the 23 wines in the style lists with a price checked by the house, 12 cost R$ 200 or more (in Brazil). To spend less, the up-to-R$ 100 list is just above.

Brazilian wine in a few lines

In 2025, according to the OIV (the International Organisation of Vine and Wine), Brazil produced 2.8 million hectoliters of wine, 280 million liters, and drank, by the OIV's estimate, 4.4 million hectoliters, the largest volume in its history. The vineyard area, counting grapes for wine, for juice and for the table, reached 91 thousand hectares.

A good part of those grapes isn't the European kind. In Rio Grande do Sul, in the 2023 harvest, there were 99.7 million kilos of vinifera, the grape of fine wine, against 565.2 million of American and hybrid grapes, the ones for table wine and juice (Sisdevin, from the Rio Grande do Sul state government). The difference between the two is in the guide to table wine and fine wine.

The seal on the label: DO and IP

In Brazil, a wine's origin has two seals, registered by INPI (the Brazilian patent and trademark office). The Indication of Provenance (IP) is for a region that became known for that wine. The Designation of Origin (DO) goes further: the wine has qualities that come from the place, from nature and from the people who work there. Each seal has a producers' association that handles control and promotion.

The country's first geographical indication, for any product, was the Vale dos Vinhedos IP, in 2002; in 2012 the Vale became Brazil's first wine DO. According to Embrapa's list, in November 2026 there are 3 DOs and 10 IPs:

The seal tells you origin and rules, not a rating. The Vale dos Vinhedos DO calls for Merlot in the red and Chardonnay in the white, and sparkling only by the traditional method, with Chardonnay, Pinot Noir or both. The Altos de Pinto Bandeira DO is sparkling only, with at least 12 months before the lees come out. And not every seal is for fine wine: the Vinhos de Bituruna IP, in Paraná, protects table wine (vinho de mesa) made from Bordô and Martha, American grapes. Two regions are working to move up a step: Campos de Cima da Serra, in Rio Grande do Sul, has been putting its indication together since 2022, and Farroupilha started a project in 2025 to go from IP to DO. To get to know the regions: Serra Gaúcha and Campanha Gaúcha.

Sparkling, the style Brazilians choose

In still fine wine (red, white and rosé from European grapes), imports rule: in 2024 they had 88% of everything sold in Brazil, according to Embrapa. With sparkling it's the opposite. Brazilians prefer the national one, and imports had only 18.1% of the market: 32.3 million liters made in Brazil against 7.1 million from abroad. And almost all of that sparkling wine comes from Rio Grande do Sul, more than 93% of production, by the same 2024 Embrapa count.

Abroad, it wins medals, but it still doesn't travel much. In 2021, of the 309 international medals won by Brazilian fine wines, 186 went to sparkling, according to Brazilian Association of Enology data compiled by Embrapa. But the country exports little: in 2024, less than half a million liters of sparkling, while it imported 7.1 million.

Moscatel has its own story. A study by Embrapa concluded that the Serra Gaúcha has good natural conditions for it, above all for the acidity, which gives freshness. And Farroupilha has the country's first geographical indication just for moscatels: it accounts for about half of Brazil's Moscato Branco, a grape Embrapa says isn't found in other countries. The bubbles, the method and the rest are in the perlage guide.

The winter harvest

Outside the South, Brazilian wine learned to shift the grape's season. Double pruning flips the vine's cycle: one pruning in August, another in January, and the grapes ripen in fall and winter, when there's little rain and the temperature is mild. The technique, adapted by Epamig, started being tested in the early 2000s; by 2021 there were already vineyards in eight of the 12 mesoregions of Minas Gerais and plots in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo. In 2025 the Sul de Minas got the first geographical indication for winter wine: vineyards above 800 meters and a harvest from June 1 to September 21.

In the backlands, the Vale do São Francisco, between Bahia and Pernambuco, makes tropical wine: with two prunings a year come two harvests, picked all year round, and the flagship is sparkling. In Santa Catarina it's the cold that rules: the Vinhos de Altitude IP brings together vineyards above 840 meters, in the coldest and highest region of southern Brazil. The Avaliação Nacional de Vinhos also made room for this wine: it accepts grapes harvested after June of the previous year, outside the South Region, precisely to fit the tropical and the double-pruned ones. You can go see it: the Vale do São Francisco itinerary.

A rating from drinkers is not a medal

The rating on this page comes from people who drank the wine and said what they thought. An expert tasting is something else, and Brazil's two best-known ones work like this.

The Avaliação Nacional de Vinhos has been run by the Brazilian Association of Enology since 1993, in Bento Gonçalves, and the ABE itself says it isn't a competition: it's an educational event, to promote Brazilian wine and teach tasting. Only dry wines from European grapes of that year's vintage go in, drawn from the winery's tank or barrel; winemakers taste blind, up to 30% of each category are ranked and 16 are shown to the public, at most one per winery. And the rules don't allow calling the 16 “the best”: they're the ones that represent the vintage, and the result can't be tied to a brand or a label, because the wine tasted there isn't wine on sale.

The Grande Prova Vinhos do Brasil, created in 2013 and organized by Grupo Baco, a media company, tastes blind wines that are already on the market, with a jury that has no commercial ties to the wineries. It accepts European or hybrid grapes, including older vintages still for sale. The judges score from 0 to 100, the median counts, and at most about 30% of the wines get a medal.

A blind tasting tells you what the expert thought that day; the X-Wines rating tells you what a lot of people thought over the years. Both help, and neither decides for you: the jury that counts is your own palate, as the pairing guide says.