A Baja Bounty
The broad green leaves of cabernet sauvignon vines are caked in fine beige dust. Our car bumping along Calle Séptima only adds to the layers churned up on the parched roads in the Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico’s most prolific wine region. We’re surrounded by browned mountains studded with smooth granite boulders, framing a valley where cactus feels more at home than grapevines.
As we turn down another deeply rutted road, our car bucks, the metal tongues of the seat belts in back ding the window glass like pellets hurled from the side of the road, and we feel like bobble-heads. These washboard roads, veining through the valley between two narrow paved highways, symbolize the dilemma confronting an area of Baja California clustered around Ensenada that now has about 100 wineries and a growing number of high-quality restaurants — and countless accompanying tourists.
“Bad roads equal good tourists,” is how Hugo D’Acosta summarizes the fight to keep the valley rural. It’s a perfect explanation that pits the passion that’s fueled tremendous growth in the past five years against the commercialism that’s beginning to take root.
Most people celebrate the Baja California valley as an emerging wine region, but it’s the oldest in North America, with vines first planted in the early 1500s. They were destroyed in 1699 when Charles I of Spain banned wine
