Hardy, drought tolerant, and vigorous growers, misión grapes were brought to the Americas some 500 years ago by Spanish missionaries. Winemakers worldwide are rediscovering the varietal—and the results are delicious
“The project is, how to develop the vineyards of the future,” says Camilo Magoni, a winemaker in the region for more than 50 years, “and not make mistakes that we will give to our children.”“We’re in a giant experiment of climate change and wine,” says Cesar Valenzuela, a scientist with Mexico’s National Institute of Research for Forests, Agriculture, and Livestock.
The heat waves caused the grapes to ripen too quickly, pushing harvest up about 20 days. A shorter, hotter time on the vine tilts the grapes’ flavor profile: When the sugar content is right for picking, the flavor-making phenols haven’t necessarily had enough time to develop, upping the difficulty of producing an excellent wine. It’s not an insurmountable challenge, Pino says, but it definitely makes it trickier to balance the wine correctly.
Unlike California’s winegrowing regions, which receive water from more precipitation-rich parts of the state, the Baja peninsula—part of Mexico—has access to essentially no source of water outside its bounds. So growers rely on winter snows in nearby mountains to fill streams and rivers, and on groundwater pumped from below.
And the demand is growing. Wine tourism in the region is booming; nearly every dusty road crisscrossing the Valle de Guadalupe is dotted with in-construction new hotels and guest houses and wine tasting rooms—and tourists want showers, hot tubs, and plenty of wine.Old-timers and newcomers alike are clear-eyed: There’s no escaping the Valle’s water and climate problems, nor any easy solution.
And perhaps more importantly, he, like some other creative winemakers across the region, are turning to the past: to misión.Aldo didn’t expect to see such a pronounced difference in his experimental vineyard, but it was striking. This year, for example, he watered his few rows of tempranillo grapes twice a week for five months; after all that they produced just a few anemicand still had plenty to fill a whole wooden press.
A few minutes away, another young winemaker is also going in hard on mission grapes. Silvana Pijoan, who is managing her family’s winemaking production and vineyard, took out a whole hillside of old, underperforming vines and replaced it with mission. Considering the ever-intensifying climate and water pressures, “it’s definitively the direction we should go,” she says.
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