I Think I'll have Another Glass of Mexican Wine
I'm in Mexico City for the Week, and I've Barely Touched a Tequila or Cervesa
In the early 2000s, I sent an email to Adam Schlessinger, the genius writer and bassist of Fountains of Wayne who I worked with on the 1 animated show Hey Joel!
“I am drinking a glass of Mexican wine,” I wrote.
Adam was shocked. It had been years since he co-wrote the song “Mexican Wine,” and he had no idea it actually existed. Adam was a man who had accidentally discovered not only a new wine region but also MILFs.
He said that he used the phrase because it sounded funny. Who would want wine from Mexico? In the song, it’s the choice of a man who has accepted his situation so completely that he’s drinking another glass of Mexican wine.
I tried to change, but I changed my mind
I think I’ll have another glass of Mexican wine.
If nibbling on sponge cake and drinking sweetened tequila sans salt is reaction to a life of bad choices in “Margaritaville,” then drinking Mexican wine is reaction to a choice-agnostic world in which people are “killed by a cellular phone explosion” and fired from their job as a United airlines pilot for reading High Times.
This seemed deeply Philistine. There were articles in every travel magazine about Valle de Guadalupe, the new Napa just across the California border past Tijuana. It has resorts, high-end restaurants, tastings, a budget to lure travel writers. And the area keeps growing. Back in 2000, four years after Adam wrote the song, the whole of Baja had 13 wineries. Today, they have way more than 200. A guy I know is building a vacation house there. The wines often get well reviewed. I buy them every so often to check them out.
They’re never cheap. They’re never great. But I keep buying them because it seems fun to drink them with Mexican food. At least conceptually, they seem interesting. There’s no official regions or rules. You want to mix French grapes and Italian grapes, go ahead. They’re mostly dark colored, high-alcohol, big reds. They never seem that fruit-forward, more earthy. Is that what I want with spicy food? No. But I’ll hold back on the spicy salsa to drink a Mexican wine. I most often buy this one, because it’s balanced and $18 and tastes different than wine I’ve had from anywhere else in the world:
I spent the week in Mexico City with my family for my son’s spring break. We went to some great restaurants, and we drank Mexican wine at all of them. We even bought some bottles at a wine store.
Adam was right. Mexican wine is funny. No one drinks it. Though the average Mexican drinks six times as much wine as they did 15 years ago, they still only drink 1.4 bottles a year, compared to 16.3 in the U.S. and 61.3 in France. Even then, less than 30 percent of wine consumed in Mexico is domestic. Mexican beer is such a big deal that the most popular beer in the United States is Modelo Especial.
Until the 1980s, Mexican wine mostly didn’t exist, except for some very old wineries, such as Casa Madero, founded in 1597, making it the oldest winery in North America. Mexicans, who are very proud of every part of their history, never bring this up.
The reason Mexican wine is so expensive is that all wine in Mexico is expensive. I was Ubering around town like a mad man for $5 a ride, and then I walked into a Walmart where the same French and American wines I’d find in the U.S. were significantly more expensive. In a Walmart. Yes, I price compare at foreign Walmarts. Because it’s better than following my lovely wife Cassandra as she buys a cartload of toiletries and cleaning items and yelling “We are only here for a week!”
Wine is expensive in Mexico because there’s a 42 percent tax on each bottle. (In California, we pay an 8.2 percent tax on wine, which I believe, is the lowest amount of taxes a Californian can legally pay for anything.) The Mexican government thinks of wine the same way Damon Lindelof does – an effete habit of the evil rich – and slaps a huge luxury tax on it. I would have gone with a huge tax on fentanyl and cocaine, but – as I learned this week in the U.S. – governments do whatever they want.
In March 2020, Adam was hospitalized with Coronavirus. On March 31, several articles said he was recuperating. I sent him an email the next day telling him how much I appreciated him. He never got it.
Adam is the only person I know who died from Covid. He was 52-years old and healthy.
I feel like we’re entering an era where the things that affect me are no longer going to be due to my bad choices. It was always such, but for most of my life, it didn’t seem it.
Tariffs might make wine as much of a luxury good here as in Mexico. But I have enough in my cellar to last a few years. And a little bit of it is from Mexico. I guess I’ll have another glass of Mexican wine.
It beat much of its competition at midnight in South Africa and Canada, which is the only time or place it aired.