Grape vines covering hills near Bento Gonçalves.

Just over 100 kilometres north of the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre lies the old colonial zone of Rio Grande do Sul, the country’s southern-most state. At the start of the 19th century, the state was frontier territory, land that the newly independent Brazil was keen to protect from possible Argentine encroachment.

Rio Grande do Sul is covered by two main eco-regions: pampas grasslands in the south and hilly, even mountainous, territory in the north. The densely forest-covered mountains were entirely unsuited to the kind of plantation-based agriculture, worked by slave labour, that dominated tropical Brazil to the north. As such, in the early 19th century it was recognised that if this new land was to be exploited, an alternative settlement pattern was required.

Rio Grande do Sul was promoted by Brazilian immigration agents as being an ideal destination for land-hungry Europeans, in particularly for Germans and Italians, seeking to establish independent family farms. Germans first arrived in 1824…