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October 5, 2000
October 2000
Baja California Wines wins
Gold HispanicVista.com
In 1791, Jesuit priests
established the Mision de Santo Tomas in Baja
California, about 90 miles south of present day
San Diego, bringing and planting vines whose
grapes were named "uva mision" (mission
grape). The first wines in the Californias were
produced at this mision.
In 1834, Dominican priests
founded the Mision de Nuestra Señora de
Guadalupe del Norte, around 70 miles south of
San Diego. This was the last mission
established in the Californias, and the one that
functioned the least time. But the valley retains
the abbreviated name "Valle de Guadalupe."
Today the valley produces around 90 per cent of
Mexico's wines, many winning international
recognition as among the best in the world. It
turned out that the Valley was blessed as one of
the rare places in the world where premium wine
grapes can be grown.
The road to the present
wasn't easy for the valley and its wines. In 1857,
after Mexico's War of Reform the Catholic Church
was stripped of all it's land holdings, which
included the missions in the lower Californias
still left to Mexico after the U.S.-Mexican war.
All Church property became the property of the
State. The government sold the former lands of
the Mision de Santo Tomas to a private group, who
established the Bodegas de Santo Tomas in 1888.
Nothing notable happened in
the Valle de Guadalupe until 1904, when a group
of one hundred Russian families settled in the
valley. The group belonged to a pacifist
religious group who abandoned Russia to avoid
their men being conscripted into the Czarist army.
They bought several hundred
acres dedicating a good portion to planting vines
producing grapes for wine, raisins, and for sale
as fruit. Others who came later followed their
example and more and more grapevines were planted.
The wines from Santo Tomas
had by then acquired a good reputation, but sales
of wines in Mexico was dormant, as wine drinkers
preferred French, German, Italian and Spanish
wines though they were exorbitantly priced.
Casa Madero, the oldest
winery in the Western Hemisphere didn't until
recently even bother with the Mexican domestic
market exporting most of its nearly 400,000
annual case production to the U.S., England,
Germany, Holland, France, Switzerland and Belgium.
Casa Pedro Domecq long
established in Valle de Guadalupe, is better
known for other products, such as "Presidente
Brandy," the world's best selling brandy, is
now also producing higher quality wines. Then L.A.
Cetto made a significant entry and the Valley
started to acquire fame. These two wineries
account for nearly 75 per cent of all wine
production in the Valley
In the 1980s, as the
popularity and sale of quality wine grew in the U.S.
and California's wines began to be recognized for
their excellence, Valle de Guadalupe came to the
full attention of a new breed of Mexican
entrepreneurs.
Recognizing the enviable
weather and soil conditions in the Guadalupe
Valley as a place where the highest quality wine
grapes could be grown, a group from Mexico City
decided to invest in producing high quality wines.
Monte Xanic (pronounced: sha-nee-ck)
was the first. In the early 1980s, they
established a vineyard next to the town of Zarco
(where the Russian immigrants settled, and many
of their descendants still live), about 25 miles
northeast of Ensenada. With painstaking care they
planted the best of vines, and with patience and
care produced their first wines in 1988, to
immediate acclaim.
No one had dared enter this
market before. Their example led to a friend of
the owners, Ernesto Alvarez-Morphy Camou, a
wealthy Mexico City entrepreneur, who was
spending some time in Baja California overseeing
one of his real estate developments, to fall in
love with the idea of producing such high quality
wines.
He purchased 500 hectares (slightly
over 1000 acres) in the Valley, and taking his
Mother's maiden name, he created Chateau Camou.
The vineyard only planted 100 acres the first
year, adding around 50 acres each year thereafter.
The results have won
national and international acclaim. In France's
"Challenge International de Vin" the
Chateau Camou label has won the Silver medal in
1998, and again in 1999, and the Bronze in 2000.
From Belgium's "Concours Mondial de
Bruxelles" it took the Great Gold Medal in
2000. Additionally, in 1998, 1999, and 2000 it
has won either the Silver or Bronze from the
"Wines of the Americas" in competition
with the best wine producing U.S. states, and
from the other Western Hemisphere countries.
Likewise Camou's two other
labels, "Viñas de Camou," and "Flor
de Guadalupe," have won Gold, Silver and
Bronze medals in France, Belgium and the U.S.
The success of Monte Xanic
and Chateau Camou resulted in opening the door to
a great increase in exporting quality Mexican
wines, and responding to the new demand in the
expansion of other wineries, and a near stampede
of new ones sprouting throughout the Valley.
The best good news is that
most of the Guadalupe Valley wineries are open to
the public. They have wine tasting and savory
treats. Some have a minimal charge, and require
an appointment.
(Partial list and telephone
numbers of some of the best Wineries:
Bodegas Santo Tomas (011-52-6)
178-3333 Chateau Camou (011-52-6) 177-2221 Monte Xanic (011-52-6) 174-6035 Vinos L.A. Cetto (011-52-6)
685-3031 (Tijuana tasting room))
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