Baja California
A wine valley in the desert, one hour from San Diego.
The Valle de Guadalupe is a wine valley in the desert, an hour south of the border at Tijuana. Thirty years ago there were a few bodegas here and a lot of dust. Today the valley produces ninety percent of Mexico's wine, and the cooking that has grown out of it — Baja Med, wood fire, seafood from the Pacific thirty minutes away — has drawn chefs from Mexico City and Los Angeles.
The landscape is spare: granite hills, sage, rows of vines that need irrigating, and a light that turns orange in the evening. The wineries aren't châteaux but farms with terraces where you sit for a long time.
Ensenada on the coast is its harbour — fish tacos, oysters, a market that smells of salt.
Baja California is California as it was before the money.
We recommend the Valle de Guadalupe to people coming from California who want a weekend that feels like a journey. Bruma is a winery with eleven rooms, built from what lay on the land: stone, old wood, earth. Olivea is a farm-to-table house where the kitchen is the centre and the rooms stand around it. Both serious, neither a stage set. Come in April when the valley is green, or in October for the harvest. Cross the border early in the morning; never come back on a Sunday evening.
