Parras: Wine in the Mexican Desert
Region: Parras de la Fuente, Coahuila, Mexico
Climate: Dry, semi-arid, with high-altitude vineyards and large temperature variations.
Grape Varieties: Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, Merlot, Malbec, Chardonnay and others.
Notable Terroir: An oasis surrounded by the arid landscape of northern Mexico, with groundwater supporting viticulture in an otherwise very dry region.
Our first morning in Parras started in the dark, in the back of a pickup truck with two local guys and their two dogs.
We were heading into the desert to watch the sunrise.
We walked between cacti as the sky slowly started to change colour, with the dogs running around us, apparently also there to keep an eye out for coyotes. Everything was dry, dusty and vast. It felt much more like the beginning of a Western than a trip to wine country.
And then, somehow, there are vines.
That's probably the thing about Parras that stayed with us first. In this very dry corner of Coahuila, people have been making wine for more than four centuries. Casa Madero traces its history back to 1597 and is considered the oldest continuously operating winery in the Americas.
One of the wineries we actually visited was Don Leo. It's much younger than Parras' historic estates, founded by Leo Mendel, who came to Mexico from Germany in 1938. Today, their vineyards grow a surprisingly broad mix of grapes, from Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz and Merlot to Malbec, Pinot Noir, Zinfandel and Chardonnay.
And after all the surprise of finding wine here, the wine itself was strangely familiar.
The wines we tried were classic and recognisable. Nothing particularly wild or experimental.
What felt different was everything around them. Think about a wine tasting, and there's probably a wooden board somewhere. On it: cheese, ham, maybe some salami. Definitely olives. Perhaps a suspiciously photogenic bunch of grapes that nobody actually eats.
We've done versions of this so many times that we'd stopped noticing it.
Then, in Parras, we were drinking wine with mole, cacao, chocolate and chillies.
So much of what we'd learnt as wine culture came with a very specific idea of what belonged next to the glass. Parras made us question that, not by making a big point about it, but simply by serving its wine in the context of the place we were actually in.
The wine could be Cabernet Sauvignon and still sit perfectly naturally next to mole. It didn't need to pretend it was in Bordeaux just because the grape came from France.
We arrived in Parras riding through the desert in the back of a pickup truck, watching for coyotes among the cacti. We left thinking about how narrow our own picture of wine country had been.
And, frankly, mole is much more exciting than another bowl of olives.
