VALLE DE GUADALUPE New flavours for Mexico's wine country

This boulder-strewn bronze sweep of Baja California has been luring wine-lovers and weekending West Coasters for some time (it’s just a 90-minute drive from the American border). Now it’s earning itself the lofty billing of Mexico’s Napa Valley, for its architect-designed tasting rooms and complex bottles – many of them innovative organic, biodynamic and minimum-intervention.

The foodie landscape has been maturing as well, drawing on farm-to-table ingredients and seafood from the nearby Pacific. One of the area’s best-loved chefs is Javier Plascencia, who set up in the Valle in 2012, when it first turned heads as an emerging wine region. His Finca Altozano now encompasses the original outdoor grill restaurant, an Airstream tortas truck, an ice-cream shop and a pop-up space under a 100-year-old oak tree. Close by, Finca La Divina is his beautiful four-bedroom B&B. Among the other foodie trailblazers are Corazón de Tierra and Laja, both of which notch up on Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants list – René Redzepi raves about the latter’s off-menu vegetable tostada.



And at Deckman’s En El Mogor, American chef Drew Deckman cooks anything from ribeye to octopus among the pines. Other outdoor hits include Baja Med restaurant Malva and TrasLomita, but the latest talked-about spot is Fauna, recently opened at slick winery-hotel Bruma. Its chef, locally raised David Castro Hussong, a graduate of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Eleven Madison Park in New York, crafts elevated tasting menus that play with Mexican classics served at relaxed communal tables.

Fresh places to stay are ramping up the options in the valley too. In August, Hotel Partana’s striking steel, wood and glass rooms were revealed, while Mexico design-hotel hit-makers Grupo Habita are working on glampsite Cuatro Cuatros to add a hotel, cabins, spa and restaurant, all set to open next summer. With the annual Valle Food & Wine Festival launched by Plascencia and LA-based chef Nancy Silverton, and following in the tradition of Napa and Sonoma, the area is well on its way to having a restaurant scene as world class as its vineyards

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