Valais and Lavaux

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.