Anonymous - 12-20-2002 at 01:13 AM
http://tinyurl.com/3pf2
By TIM WEINER
FRANCISCO ZARCO, Mexico, Dec. 17 ? Everyone knows, as the old saying goes, that there is truth in wine. But almost no one knows this truth: there is
wine in Mexico.
Up a rutted dirt road 10 miles as the eagle flies from the Pacific Ocean, nestled in a valley almost no one has heard of, Hans Backhoff is squeezing
fine wine from the dry soil, carrying on a tradition that goes back nearly 500 years.
Despite his Teutonic name, Mr. Backhoff is, like his wine, a pure product of Mexico, with tangled roots abroad. He was born in 1946 in the coastal
town of Ensenada, in Baja California, where his Nicaraguan-born father had gone to make money extracting vitamin A from sharks' livers.
Mr. Backhoff took an early interest in the transformative powers of food science. Thirty years ago, while studying for a graduate degree in that field
in Britain, he read a noted wine authority's dismissal of the possibility of growing good wine in Mexico.
Too hot, said the expert. Nonsense, said Mr. Backhoff.
Thus began a lifelong obsession.
"This land is a jewel, and very few people know it," he said, gazing into the distance from a ledge overlooking his fields. "We even have to fight to
make our own government understand. Not many countries are lucky enough to have this kind of terrain."
The temperature falls to near freezing many a night here in the Guadelupe Valley. A cooling wind comes up from the Pacific and the hilly terrain is
not so different from the curvaceous peaks of the other California, across the border in the United States.
Wine had been made in Mexico since the 1520's, on orders from the Spanish conquerors, who commanded that 1,000 vines be planted for every 100 Indians
enslaved. That wine proved so good, so bounteous, that it set off a weird trade war.
"When the wine from the New World began to compete with Spanish wine, the Spanish crown ordered that the vines be ripped up," Mr. Backhoff said,
shaking his head at the waste of it all.
Viceroys enforced the order, sometimes violently, into the 19th century. Most of what survived was barely good enough to make cheap brandy.
Wine-growing in Mexico survived in large part because an Irishman in Livermore, Calif., James Concannon, shipped a million cuttings of vines that
originated in France to Mexican growers, with the blessings of the dictator Porfiro D?az, in 1890.
For years, Mr. Backhoff nurtured a dream of someday cultivating his own wine ? one made in Mexico, but tasting as good as the French vintages he
remembers sipping when a graduate student.
In 1988, after 15 years of seeking his fortune in the soft-drink business, he took the plunge, regarded by friends as somewhere beyond foolhardy, of
starting up his vineyard, Monte Xanic.
"Once you're involved in wine, there's no going back," he said. "Your life changes completely."
He bought a tangle of vines planted by the children of a colony of teetotaling Russian pacifists who had come to Mexico, fleeing the czar, in 1904. He
grafted merlot and sauvignon blanc and chardonnay vines on to the old rootstocks. He prayed for rain ? about a foot falls here each year ? and built a
drip-irrigation system out of an aquifer below his fields.
He was swimming upstream against a flood of cheap (and government-subsidized) wine available in Mexico from Chile and Europe, not to mention the flow
from California. And unlike the American and European vintners, he was struggling without government subsidy.
Since Mexico opened its borders to free trade, the number of wineries in the country has dropped from more than 80 to fewer than 20. Mexican tax laws
favor foreign imports, making a bottle of Monte Xanic less expensive in San Francisco than here in Francisco Zarco.
"Mexico," Mr. Backhoff admits, "has a strong stereotype of tequilas and tacos," not musky merlots. Mexicans drink half a bottle per person per year,
compared with 10 bottles per capita in the United States.
"We started from zero," he reflected. "No one knew us. We could hardly sell our wine in markets in Mexico. We gave wine away."
Since then, the wine has won awards in France and in California. Aerom?xico, a state-owned airline, has started serving it to first-class passengers.
Monte Xanic is making money, and now produces 47,000 cases a year, about 2,000 of which are sold in the United States.
The wine tastes good; it intermingles all the cultures from which it rises ? French, Spanish, Californian ? but it tastes like none of them. "They are
making serious wine," said Todd Alexander, a wine distributor and importer in Atlanta who does not sell Monte Xanic."They will hold their own with
wine from anywhere in the world."
Come summer, migrant workers will spend 16 hours every day in these fields, picking the white-wine grapes in the cool of the night, the red-wine
grapes in the blazing heat of day, and the $600 French oak barrels will be filled with a new vintage. On the cusp of winter, the fields lie sleeping.
Mr. Backhoff, king of a dominion little known in the rest of the world, surveys his terrain with pride.
"We're the winery that started the Mexican revolution," he said.
Salud
JESSE - 12-20-2002 at 12:43 PM
The story made me pop a cork of Tempranillo-Cabernet, so see you later people, this is going to be a long and festive Friday.
Salud!!!!!