If You've Never Visited A Winery Before, This Is The Place To Go
Walking into wine country for the first time can feel a little intimidating. People throw around words like "terroir" willy nilly, fancy glasses everywhere that look nothing like the ones you own, tasting notes descriptions that are vague at best. It's a lot. And if you've ever stood in a tasting room thinking, "Am I doing this right?", you're not alone.
However, there are wineries out there that actually get it. They're built for people who are new to all this, and one of them just got named the best winery in the world.
Santa Rita Winery, tucked into Chile's Maipo Valley, was just crowned No. 1 on Forbes' "The World's 50 Best Wineries 2025" list. Of its many upsides, it also might be the single friendliest place on earth to take your very first sip of wine country life.
Getting To Santa Rita
Unless you’re lucky enough to live close to wine country, the very first thing you have to worry about is logistics. Flights, hotels, rental cars, getting lost on an unknown road… it doesn’t make for a very relaxing start to your trip.
Santa Rita takes most of that off the table. The estate sits just 45 minutes south of Santiago, and if you'd rather not drive at all, Civitatis offers small-group tours with hotel pickup and drop-off from neighborhoods including Providencia, Las Condes, Vitacura, and Santiago Centro. The whole journey runs about four hours— long enough to actually absorb something, short enough that you won't end up exhausted.
Once you're there, the guides walk you through everything at a very respectable pace. From the vineyard rows to the barrel room, you're eased into tasting with enough context that the flavors start to mean something. The premium option keeps groups to a maximum of eight people and also includes a visit to the Centennial Park and chapel, which, as you'll see, is well worth it.
The History
A lot of wineries have a little "established in" plaque somewhere and call it history. Santa Rita goes much deeper than that.
The winery was founded in 1880, and the whole estate was declared a Chilean National Monument in 1972. So when you're walking around, you're not just visiting a winery. You're walking through a place the country officially decided was worth protecting. That feeling comes through in the old cellars, the architecture, the way everything has been cared for.
The most memorable stop? The 120 Patriotas Cellar. During Chile's independence movement, 120 soldiers took shelter there. That story lives on today in the winery's famous "120" label. Suddenly, that glass of red has a little story behind it, and somehow it tastes better for it.
Outside, the winery opens up into a beautiful, sprawling estate. The main house -- built in 1883 and now operating as Hotel Casa Real, sits alongside a neo-Gothic chapel and a sprawling 40-hectare centenary park. That park was designed by French landscape gardener Guillaume Renner, https://www.santarita.com/en/casa-real-hotel/ which explains why wandering through it feels like stumbling into a painting.
The Tastings
Here's what a good first tasting experience looks like: you learn a little, you sip a little, and nobody makes you feel silly for enjoying the overly sugary or fruity one. That's exactly the vibe at Santa Rita.
Viator's half-day tour includes three tastings woven into the vineyard visit and history walk. Three is actually the perfect number for a beginner; it’s enough to start noticing differences, but not so many that everything blurs together.
Food is part of it too, which helps more than you'd think. Civitatis' Tour Plus and Premium Tour options pair four wines with cheese, crackers, and dried fruits. That pairing gives your palate something familiar to hold onto, so instead of getting lost in abstract descriptions, you actually get to figure out what you really like.
And when the tasting wraps up, the day still isn't over. Right there on the estate, Museo Andino houses around 3,000 archaeological and ethnographic artifacts. It's a genuinely interesting cultural detour that also doubles as a nice mental reset after having your fair share of wine.
Santa Rita also offers eight different curated tour experiences, including a "winemaker for a day" option and a tour focused on Carmenère, a grape that was only rediscovered about 30 years ago. You don't have to do any of that on a first visit. The classic tour is more than enough. But it's nice knowing there's somewhere to go once wine starts feeling a little less like a foreign language.
