Newfound wine appreciation in Ensenada

We stopped for a day in Ensenada to tour the Guadalupe Valley – it actually sits 70 miles south of the Tijuana border crossing – and it’s the premier and dominant site for most of Mexico’s wine production. There are more than 180 wineries and they account for about 80% of the entire wine production in Mexico.

Before you get all excited, though, and expect some sort of treatise on wine, let me remind you that I don’t like wine and would always rather have a Pepsi.

But I am excited to tell you about what I learned from my Road Scholar friends as we sat and had lunch and wine at Las Nubes Winery:

You see, two of my tour mates are some kind of extremely special wine connoisseurs and I got to sit near them, listening to their wine assessment skills, appreciating their refined palates, and their exquisite mastery of the English language. As the wines were poured, Ron and I had our standard wine conversation: Do you like it? No etc. etc. etc.

But off to my right, I thought I heard someone thoughtfully describe the wine as “BARNYARDY” and I knew immediately that we could be friends. She followed up that tasting review with the assessment that the smell of a pink Zinfandel reminded her of a “FELT TIP MARKER” and suddenly I was in my element, sharing my wine convictions freely! I suggested “PAINT THINNER” and everyone was okay with that and it’s moments like this that make travel worth all the effort!

In other news, Ron and I are cultivating the most epic of all disagreements. Artemio brought in some folkloric dancers during our dinner tonight, and Ron proudly told me that, while I had stepped away from the table, he picked up the camera and took some photos. But I found this on the camera, and Ron is adamant that he did not take it, and to bolster his position, he keeps pointing out that he doesn’t even know how to take a video, which seems accurate because the chocolate-covered strawberry on that paper plate is so sloppily not centered in the video:

I’ll leave you with this picture of Artemio, who can instruct us on the entirety of Mexican political history, while standing on that narrow railing, perched perilously over those rocks. I’m sitting here in our hotel room, all comfy on the bed with a cup of coffee and Wikipedia at the ready, and I still can’t come up with much in the way of concrete Mexican history facts. But here you go, with the caveat that I might be missing a few eras/wars. Mexico was populated over 13,000 years ago, gained independence from Spain in 1821, and somehow France worked their way in charge for awhile in the 1860s (note: this was a total and complete surprise to me).

There was also the Mexican-American war in 1846 over, of all things, Texas. It probably comes as no real surprise to those of us that have traveled to Texas in the heat of summer that the true annexation goal was not Texas – it was everything west of there, right to the much more temperate beach towns at the Pacific Ocean like Cardiff, where, a mere 178 years later, I drive through in my rented Nissan Rogue and shell out $500 at the Patagonia store! (Another note: the US, being a capitalistic country, first tried to buy Texas for 30 million dollars – about 750 million dollars today, which, for family members seething over the Patagonia outlay, makes me look quiet spendthrift.)

Apparently we’re driving 5 hours south in a few minutes and we’re going to be mostly out of cell and Wi-Fi range for about 2 days, so I’ll be back with you when we’re with the whales.