ADVENTURES Wine’s Nuevo Frontier
I his,” Branko Pjanic is telling me, “is what we call breaking the sombrero.” He’s plunging a four-foot steel tool, essentially a jumbo potato masher, into an open barrel of cabernet franc grapes. From Spanglish to English, breaking the sombrero translates as breaking the cap, but from winemaker to layperson, it means this: He’s busting up the raft of floating grapes at the top—that’s the cap—to integrate them into the fermenting juice below. It’s not easy work, which is why most wineries use mechanical pumps, but at Cava el Garambullo, the winery Pjanic and his wife, Natalia López Mota, founded two years ago, just about everything is done by hand. This aligns with their natural approach to winemaking—organic grapes, indigenous yeasts, little to no added sulfur. But this isn’t all that sets them apart in the wine world.
El Garambullo is housed in a former cheese-making facility about fifteen minutes north of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and about three hours north of Mexico City. According to the age-old precepts of viticulture, wine grapes shouldn’t thrive here. San Miguel de Allende sits
