Country

Chile

A major fruit exporter with a genuine rural fermented apple tradition in the south — chicha de manzana — which is quite separate from the small modern commercial cider category.

ISO country code: CL
Level: Sovereign state
Native name: Chile
Regions recorded: None recorded separately
Protected designations: None recorded

The tradition

What cider making here is, on its own terms — the fruit it uses, the shape of the drink, and the part it plays.

Chicha de manzana is a rural southern tradition: apples pressed and fermented on farms in Araucanía, Los Ríos, Los Lagos and Chiloé, drunk young, cloudy and usually within the season.
The tradition is associated particularly with the wet, temperate south, including Mapuche and southern campesino communities, and with autumn harvest and pressing as a communal activity.
The apples used are largely feral and old naturalised seedling trees rather than named cultivars, which makes the fruit base genuinely different from a planted orchard tradition.
A separate modern commercial cider category exists at small scale and belongs to the international craft expansion, using dessert fruit from the country’s export orchards.
Chile’s national drink identity rests on wine and on pisco; cider occupies a regional and rural rather than national position.

How cider is defined and taxed here

A legal definition is not a description of good practice. It sets the floor a drink must clear to be sold under the word, and the floor is in a different place in every country — which is why the same label term can mean two quite different things either side of a border.

Fermented fruit beverages are regulated within the national alcoholic beverages framework, which is built principally around wine and spirits.
Chicha is a recognised traditional category in Chilean usage and covers fermented fruit drinks made in a traditional manner; the extent to which farm production sits inside or outside formal regulation is not something CiderHQ can document from its register.
Additive and contaminant limits, including for patulin in apple products, arrive through the general food safety framework rather than through drinks law.
There is no appellation framework for cider; Chilean denomination-of-origin instruments apply to pisco and to wine.
CiderHQ holds no registered Chilean source, so this record describes structure at a general level and states no thresholds or definitions.

Rules change

Definitions, minimum juice contents and duty bands are amended, and CiderHQ records the structure of a rule rather than reproducing figures it has not verified against the instrument itself. Anyone making a commercial decision should read the current legislation or the revenue authority’s own guidance. The sources at the foot of this page are where to start.

Cider and perry in Chile

Chile has two entirely separate things that could be called cider, and conflating them would misrepresent both. The first is chicha de manzana, a genuine rural tradition of the wet temperate south, where apples are pressed and fermented on farms and drunk young, cloudy and usually within the season. It is a harvest-time activity, communal in character, and associated with southern rural and Mapuche communities.

What makes it unusual as a fruit base is that much of the fruit is feral. Apples naturalised widely in southern Chile after their introduction, and the trees that supply chicha are frequently old seedlings rather than named grafted cultivars. That is an almost unique situation among the world’s fermented apple traditions, where the fruit is nearly always a selected and propagated population.

The second thing is a small modern commercial cider category, drawing on the country’s substantial export orchard sector and belonging to the international craft expansion. It shares a raw material with the first and almost nothing else.

CiderHQ holds no registered Chilean source, and this record is deliberately limited. It names a real tradition, describes what is distinctive about its fruit, distinguishes it from the modern category, and does not attempt to state Chilean law beyond its general shape.

Regions

The cider-making areas recorded within this country. Where an area has sub-regions, they are named on its card.

No regions recorded separately

Cider making in Chile is recorded at national level rather than broken into regions. That is a statement about the record, not about the country: where the tradition is genuinely regional, the regions are given pages of their own.

Styles made here

Categories whose definition or characteristic practice belongs to this country.

What people ask next

Questions readers ask about the things this page mentions. Each one goes to the section that answers it rather than to a page written to receive the question.

How is supermarket cider made
What is wild fermented cider
Why does my dry cider still taste sweet — Alcohol, glycerol and ripe fruit aroma all read as sweetness even when no sugar remains. High alcohol in particular is perceived as sweet before it is perceived as strong.
Is cider meant to be still or sparkling

Where to go next

All cider regions and countries — The other traditions, grouped by the family each belongs to.
Protected designations — Every reserved name on CiderHQ, grouped by country.
Styles — What defines each category, and what legitimately varies inside it.

Sources

What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.

Codex Alimentarius food standards
FAO / WHO · standards body · retrieved 2026-08-24
GRIN-Global germplasm database — Malus and Pyrus
United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service · research institute · retrieved 2026-08-24

Country and region records describe practice and tradition. How CiderHQ handles evidence.