Valais and Lavaux in a minute

The grapes: Chasselas (called Fendant), Pinot Noir, Gamay, and the Valais’s own Petite Arvine and Cornalin

What it tastes like: Whites are light, dry and faintly flinty; the reds fresh and red-fruited.

Good to know

The Swiss drink almost all their own wine, so you rarely see it abroad and it is never cheap. The terraces of Lavaux are a World Heritage site.

On the label

Named after the grape and the village or canton. Fendant means Chasselas from the Valais.

What the land costs

The dearest vineyards here are in Valais: ≈$481,464–≈$601,830 a hectare (2016). Zone by zone

The business side

The Valais is Switzerland’s largest wine region, about 4,800 hectares of terraces on the steep sides of the upper Rhône, with Lavaux’s 800 hectares of lakeside terraces the most famous sight in Swiss wine. Switzerland drinks nearly all of its own wine, so prices are set at home by a rich domestic market, and vineyard land costs as much as in good French appellations. Land changes hands privately and there is no official price table.

Economics in brief

Swiss wine is expensive to make: small terraced parcels, hand work on walls and slopes, high wages and a strong franc. It is also protected by a home market that pays for it, and by import quotas that kept foreign wine out for most of the twentieth century. Only about one bottle in a hundred is exported, so the wines are rarely seen abroad and hard to value from outside.

The best-known grapes are Chasselas (called Fendant in the Valais) for white and Pinot Noir and Gamay for red, with the Valais’s own Petite Arvine, Cornalin and Humagne. Interest from abroad is new and growing, which is why the region appears here.

Facts and figures

Vineyard area, Valais

≈ 4,800 haCanton du Valais, Service de l’agriculture

Vineyard area, Lavaux

≈ 800 ha, UNESCO World Heritage since 2007UNESCO

The numbers behind the region: land, grapes, yields and costs

Compare regions

Input	Range	Unit	Year	Source
Land — what a hectare of vineyard sells for
Vineyard land, ValaisAbout CHF 50 a square metre, the latest public figure; Swiss vineyard changes hands…	400,000–500,000	CHF/ha	2016	Génération Vignerons

Where the inputs come from

Génération Vignerons, ‘S’installer en Suisse’ (about CHF 50 a square metre in the Valais, 2016; Switzerland publishes no official table)

Sources

Vignoble valaisan, Canton du Valais, Service de l’agriculture, 2025. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
Lavaux, Vineyard Terraces, UNESCO World Heritage Centre, 2007. Retrieved 6 October 2026.
S’installer en Suisse: Clément, jeune vigneron du Valais, Génération Vignerons, 2016. Retrieved 6 October 2026.

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