Mexico’s first fully-certified organic wine will officially launch in 2019 although a smaller batch of 500 bottles will be released this year.
The wine is made by the Finca La Carrodilla winery in Mexico’s most famous wine region, the Valle de Guadalupe in Baja California.
“This year we will launch a very limited edition and in 2019, we will officially launch. It’s a wine that won’t have sulfites or any kind of preservatives. No acidity, pH, tartaric acid or any kind of external agent is added to correct the wine,” said Fernando Pérez Castro, the winery’s project director.
He added that La Carrodilla was certified as organic this year under the California Certified Organic Farmers program, becoming the first wine producer in the country to receive the designation.
Later this year, the winery also hopes to obtain certification from Demeter, the largest certification organization for biodynamic agriculture.
The wine will be an unoaked syrah, or shiraz, Pérez said, adding that the winery will make 2,000 bottles next year that will be sold mainly at the cellar door but also at some selected retailers under the brand name of Árbol.
Pérez, who is also the president of the wine industry trade group Provino Baja California, said that other wineries in the region are also exploring ways to make their grape-growing and wine-making processes more natural.
“The market is asking for it. There is a generation of people who are very eager to try new things and above all [products] that are of high quality, are clear about where they come from and preferably have been manipulated and affected by external chemical agents as little as possible,” he said.
One winery far from Valle de Guadalupe in a lesser known wine-producing region of Mexico has already heeded that advice.
Located in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Vinícola Toyán is also making organic wine although it is unclear whether the wine and the vineyard have been certified as such.
“Here we decided to dedicate ourselves to organic agriculture because through history wine has been a very healthy thing,” said Martha Molina, the winery’s owner.
“. . . Humans always want to hurry and make things with chemicals. Our objective is to offer a traditional, quality wine,” she added.
The vineyard, set on 12 hectares adjacent to the San Miguel-Querétaro highway, also features a circular-shaped cellar located 14 meters underground that was designed to be in balance with nature, ecological, in tune with its surroundings and perfectly suited to storing wine.
