If you’ve geeked out at a wine tasting room, wine bar, or local wine shop, you may have come across the term hectare in conversation about the land the grapes were grown on, but what exactly is a hectare?
A hectare is a unit of measurement used by farmers to describe an area that is 10,000 m². Another way of looking at it is 1 hectare is equal to around 2.47 acres.
As grapes for winemaking are grown by farmers, the standard farm practice of measuring in hectares still stands. You will not often hear a winemaker speak about his or hers estate vineyards being 24.7 acres, they would say they have 10 hectares of estate vineyards.
But how much wine would their estate vineyards produce across 10 hectares? That really all depends on yield, year, and type of grape, but in broad strokes, one hectare can produce between ~300 and ~1,500 cases of wine, so the winemaker’s 10 hectares of estate vineyards could produce between ~3,000 and ~15,000 cases of wine based on the conditions that the vineyard met in that year.