Enhancing the Visitor Experience

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• Restaurants and wine bars
• Partnering with wine clubs and groups
• Targeting key countries

Fine wine tourism is gaining momentum in Chile, with wineries recognizing the importance of offering a premium experience to visitors. Enhancing the visitor experience is a key aspect of this trend, with producers focusing on restaurants, wine bars, and partnering with wine clubs and groups to attract well-to-do tourists.

Winery directors and CEOs are discovering that there is more than one way to charm a well-to-do tourist into opening their wallet. One winery that has gone for glamour is Vik, with its hyper-modern winery and art-laden hotel making it a luxury destination in Cachapoal Valley. Vik CEO Gastón Williams sums up the offering to visitors as “a holistic experience that connects guests with wine culture” which, crucially, “encourages wine purchases both at the winery and in the restaurant.”

Williams continues: “This enables us to control distribution, ensuring that customers have access to exclusive products, thereby increasing both sales and brand recognition in the market.” Vik has three restaurants serving its wines: Milla Milla, Pavilion and Vik Zero.

A Holistic Experience

Others are also keen to enhance their visitor experience with restaurants, including Montes. In 2017, the winery opened its Fuegos de Apalta restaurant, serving wood-fired South American dishes alongside Montes wines such as the producer ’s famous Purple Angel and Muse. The eatery is nestled among the vines.

“Each year, we welcome between 15,000 and 20,000 visitors to our vineyard and restaurant, with more than 60% of them opting for the combined experience,” says Montes CMO Danilo Buvinic. “International visitors make up 75% of our guests, with Brazil being the most significant market by far, accounting for around 53% of our foreign visitors each year.”

Brazilian Bonus

Indeed, visitors from Brazil are vital for Chilean wine tourism – 787,036 of the more than five million visitors to Chile last year were Brazilian, and they haven’t just come for the skiing. Brazil applies a 27% import duty on wine coming into the country, so buying fine wine in its country of origin and bringing it back is a cost-cutting measure for some Brazilians.

“Since Brazil has a huge duty on wine, and people are allowed to bring up to 24 bottles of alcohol with them, they [Brazilians] usually buy a lot of wine in Chile, and they carry all those bottles with them in their luggage back to Brazil,” notes Buvinic.

Changing Visitor Patterns

However, the make-up of international visitors to Chilean wineries is steadily changing with time. In 2015, 64.6% of the foreign visitors to Chilean vineyards were Brazilian, but by 2023 this proportion had dipped to 52.2%. By contrast, the proportion of visitors coming from the UK more than doubled, going from 1% to 2.4%, according to Chile’s Servicio Nacional de Turismo.

British Airways began to offer a direct service between London Heathrow and Santiago in 2017, a factor which has undoubtedly made a holiday to Chile a more enticing prospect.

Other Countries of Origin

There are also plenty of tourists coming from the other side of the Andes – more than two million of the total number of foreign visitors to Chile in 2024 were in fact Argentinian. This South American country has shown signs of a steady recovery from its recent economic woes, with the Argentine peso gradually regaining value – a factor which has made buying wine from Chilean cellar doors more affordable for Argentinian visitors than it has been for some time.

The Covid Effect on Wine Tourism

“After the pandemic, there was a significant increase in Brazilian tourists, especially during the winter season,” explains José According to data compiled by the Universidad de Talca Observatorio de Enoturismo, there has been a preand post-pandemic shift in what Chilean wineries offer visitors, with many cutting back on features such as tasting rooms, museums and even wi-fi for guests during the forced period of closure – and the recovery has been slow.

Cono Sur’s Tourism Project

Cono Sur’s tourism project began working on its proposal in 2019, and Covid just delayed its opening. Soledad Meneses Pastén, Cono Sur ’s wine tourism and hospitality manager, explains: “During 2020, we worked on fine-tuning the proposal, and when it was clear that Covid was the ‘new reality’ – at least for a while – we decided to open the wine shop in Chimbarongo in February 2021, the first stage of our project.”

“Eventually we opened for tours in July 2021, as the Covid restrictions started to ease,” continues Pastén.