Mother Nature’s fury was unleashed on Chilean wineries in the early morning of February 27 as the powerful earthquake ripped open stainless steel tanks full of fermenting grapes, ruptured barrels and smashed bottles in the country’s main wine producing regions.

“Our storage tanks collapsed and wine went everywhere, it was chaos,” recalls José Miguel Viu, Managing Director of the family-run Viu Manent vineyard in the Colchagua Valley, some 150km south of Santiago.

Like other vineyards in Colch

Mother Nature’s fury was unleashed on Chilean wineries in the early morning of February 27 as the powerful earthquake ripped open stainless steel tanks full of fermenting grapes, ruptured barrels and smashed bottles in the country’s main wine producing regions.

“Our storage tanks collapsed and wine went everywhere, it was chaos,” recalls José Miguel Viu, Managing Director of the family-run Viu Manent vineyard in the Colchagua Valley, some 150km south of Santiago.

Like other vineyards in Colch

Chileans are gradually rebuilding their lives after February’s devastating earthquake, but the work for insurance companies has only just begun.

Insured losses are estimated at between US$5 billion and US$8 billion, or between 16.7% and 26.7% of total damages.

In the aftermath of February’s earthquake attention has focused on the cost of reconstruction, but the earthquake is also taking its toll on other areas of the economy including tourism.

Chile’s tourism industry brings in around US$ 2 billion a year and attracted over 2 million visitors in 2008 thanks to global campaigns featuring images of wineries, beaches and the country’s pristine natural attractions.

However, the 2008/09 global economic crisis, and now the earthquake, is keeping tourists

En las primeras horas del 27 de febrero, el cielo nocturno sobre Santiago estaba inusualmente brillante: las estrellas titilaban y la luna resplandecía.

In April, Javier Donoso, a Chilean entrepreneur, spent three weeks visiting clients in four Asian countries and, after a brief home stop, was off again to Europe. On both continents, he was explaining why the seafood export company he founded in 1993 has had to reschedule its shipments for this year.

The company, Geomar, has its canning plant and distribution center in Coronel, just south of the city of Concepción, one of the areas of southern Chile that suffered the worst devastation in the earthquake of February 27.

Nearly two months after Chile was hit by one of the biggest earthquakes in its history, the extent of the damage is becoming clearer, but even now there are widely diverging estimates of how much the reconstruction process will cost.

Some have put the figure as high as US$50 billion, others as low as US$ 8 billion. In March, Finance Minister Felipe Larraín estimated the total cost to the country at US$ 30 billion, or around 17% of GDP.

As President Piñera arrived in Valparaiso on March 11 to accept the presidential sash from Michelle Bachelet, presidents and foreign dignitaries gathered for the occasion looked afraid.