Guadalupe 2025

​In January just before Trump was sworn in for his second term, we decided to travel again to the Guadalupe Valley for wine tasting.  Our group took a tour set up by Ray Ochoa (www.BajaWineandDineTours.com), providing the transportation in Mexico and arranging for the winery visits and lunch.  We drove down to the San Ysidro crossing, parked there, and walked into Mexico, meeting Ray’s driver in Tiajuana.
Warning:  If you plan on travelling to Mexico, we strongly recommend that you get Global Entry.  If we did not have Global Entry, we would have waited in line to get back into the US for around three hours.  With Global Entry it took about ten minutes!
Our intrepid team were a bit much for our first stop on the way, a boutique winery with relatively modest wines, so I will skip them and talk about our second stop, Don Tomas Vinedo.  They have an outstanding facility, though the road there is not particularly good.  Paving might help….  You can see the facility in the pictures that follow.  Not much for a view though, but they did have a cave.  As for the wines, well, they were just so-so.

​After Don Tomas we stopped for lunch at Finca Altozano.  OMG!  Fantastic food!  My wife and I erred and ordered sangrias, but fortunately others on our table ordered wine which we got to taste.  Best we had to that point!  Note that the grapes come from the San Vicente Valley, located in Baja California just south of Guadalupe.  Perfect wine for their great food!

​The real highlight of the trip was what followed Finca:  Casa Magoni Winery.  The winery is very close to Finca – on a paved road, no less!  Not a small winery.  We had a wonderful time sitting outside under an ancient oak tree drinking very good wine!  The wine was so good that the tree kept trying to steal it….  Well, it was late in the day, and this was our third winery….

​The best of the wines was their Nebbiolo.  They offered us two versions to taste.  Their reserve version is Clone 34 Nebbiolo, and is quite nice.  With some aging will fall into the very nice category.  Unfortunately for Clone 34, they have a Nebbiolo de Baja at less than half the price that is just outstanding!  Needless to say, we brought some of it home….