Up a rutted dirt road 6km 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 Mexican soil, carrying on a tradition that goes back nearly 500 years.
Despite his Teutonic name, 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.
Thirty years ago, while studying for a graduate degree in food science in Britain, he read a noted wine authority's dismissal of the possibility of growing good wine in Mexico. Too hot, said the expert. Thus began a lifelong obsession.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
"This land is a jewel, and very few people know it," he said, gazing into the distance from a ledge overlooking his fields.
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 US.
Wine had been made in Mexico since the 1520s, on orders from the Spanish conquerors, who commanded that 1,000 vines be planted for every 100 Indians enslaved.
"When the wine from the New World began to compete with Spanish wine, the Spanish crown ordered that the vines be ripped up," Backhoff said, shaking his head at the waste of it all.
For years, 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. He grafted merlot and sauvignon blanc and chardonnay vines on to old rootstocks.
Since then, the wine has won awards in France and in California. Aeromexico, 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 US.
The wine tastes good; it intermingles all the cultures from which it rises -- French, Spanish, Californian -- but it tastes like none of them.
"They will hold their own with wine from anywhere in the world," said Todd Alexander, a wine distributor and importer in Atlanta who does not sell Monte Xanic.
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