Following Cinco de Mayo

Okay, I know you didn't drink wine yesterday. It was Cinco de Mayo and you drank tequila. That's okay. And, it's funny how Cinco de Mayo celebrates a battle from the US Civil War era that took place in Puebla, Mexico. I was in Puebla a few years ago, not once, but twice for the same professional meeting, the first one getting cancelled after we got there due to a major earthquake with its epicenter barely outside of Puebla. 

While that makes for an interesting story, it's not why I bring it up. While in Puebla, we spoke to the locals. Even in the city where the battle occurred, they don't have particularly large celebrations for Cinco de Mayo. Rather, they just go about their lives and drink some tequila like they might on any other day.

So, what does all this have to do with wine? Not much. But, in honor of the drunken fiasco that occurs in the US every year on May 5, I thought I would talk about Mexican wine. That leaves me a but stuck, though, despite the climate being right for it in many places, wine production in most of the country is not great. Some might call it non-existent.

Mexico is a large country by any standards. With the temperature varying in most of the country from warm to hot, lots of rough and uneven terrain, and plenty of natural water sources, one might think that the country would have plenty of great wine regions. It does not.

The best wine in the country and for people who drink their wine seriously, perhaps the only serious wine in the country comes from a small part of Baja California called Valle de Guadalupe. With the heart of the valley near the Pacific Ocean and roughly 70 miles south of the border crossing between San Diego in the US and Tijuana in Mexico, everything is right for making some great wine. While there are more than 100 wineries in this community of fewer than 6,000 people, very little is worth drinking and trust me, when I was in Puebla (very different part of the country, but sourcing many of their wines from Valle de Guadalupe), I drank a number of wines from that region.

Sadly, most of the wines that they make there pair better with food other than Mexican rather than traditional Mexican food. What they do make is largely big and rich, often over-extracted, but in the few wineries that excel really quite good. The red wines are composed primarily of Bordeaux grapes, Cabernet, Merlot, and Malbec, in particular, while the whites feature more Chenin Blanc and Colombard than anything else. The reds might pair well with traditional Mexican beef dishes while the whites are full-bodied enough to stand up to the spices and often heat of dishes we know to put our tongues on fire.

Maybe there will come a day when some enterprising winemakers who have built wineries in unusual places will find that the climare combined with the inexpensive land to make some really great wine here. In the meantime, drink for the experience, but not with tremendous expectations. There is always tequila.