Valle de Guadalupe

Three Winemakers, One Wine, and the Night It Opened

Written by Alejandro, wine writer and travel advisor.

Last night we ran Taste of Mexico at The Speckled Pear, a five course dinner built mostly around Mexican wine, with two pours from outside the country woven in on purpose, one from Napa, one from Jerez. I built the lineup myself, course by course, thinking about what each dish actually needed rather than reaching for whatever felt impressive. That is usually where the real work is, not picking good wines, picking the right wine for the exact plate in front of it.

The night opened with sea bass, compressed mango, and a frozen aguachile rojo, and I wanted the first pour to match the mood of a first course, light, easy, nothing that asks too much of the table before people have even settled in. A sparkling Blanc de Blancs from Valle de Guadalupe did exactly that. The bubbles cooled the chili down instead of fighting it, and there was enough freshness in the glass to sit right alongside the mango without ever stepping in front of it.

The label on that bottle says Tresparauno. I chose it for how it would taste next to that specific course. What I did not fully appreciate until I went looking afterward is who actually made it.

The name is a contraction of Tres Para Uno, three for one, and it is exactly that. The project was not built by a single winery chasing a new style, it was built by three winemakers who did not even start in the same country. Cristina Pino came from Spain, with a doctorate in oenology behind her. Sergio Heras came from Mendoza, Argentina. Daniel Lonnberg came from Santiago, Chile, arriving in Ensenada for a harvest that was only supposed to last a couple of years, and then never really left once he saw what the valley could become. Three different countries, three different training grounds, all landing in the same small valley and deciding to make sparkling wine together, not separately.

Sparkling wine is not an easy thing to do well in a warm-climate region, and Valle de Guadalupe is exactly that, closer in spirit to the Mediterranean than to Champagne. Getting real precision out of a place like that takes patience most producers are not willing to spend, since the payoff is slower and less forgiving than a big, generous red. That three winemakers who did not grow up in the same country, let alone the same valley, chose to spend that patience together says something about where the region sees itself heading.

Here is the part I did not connect until the dinner was already over. Course four that same night was a 2019 Adobe Guadalupe ‘Rafael’ Red Blend, full and structured, built to stand next to carnitas and mole negro. Adobe Guadalupe is Daniel Lonnberg’s own winery. The same hands that helped build Tresparauno’s opening pour were also behind the wine that carried the meal’s biggest, most serious course. One winemaker, two very different wines, both on the same table, four courses apart.

I did not plan that thread on purpose. I built the lineup around what each course needed, the sparkling for the aguachile, the structured red for the mole. But finding out afterward that one person’s work was quietly running underneath both ends of the night is exactly the kind of thing that makes me love writing about wine in the first place. You plan a dinner around flavor, and the story finds its way in anyway.

None of this would have made it onto a table in South Carolina without an importer willing to do the unglamorous work of getting Baja wine across the border and into the US market in the first place. Both Tresparauno and Adobe Guadalupe come through La Competencia Imports, which has spent real effort building a real presence for Mexican wine stateside, one that barely existed here a decade ago. It is easy to talk about a region’s winemakers and forget the people making sure the rest of us can actually get a bottle in hand. That part of the story deserves a mention too.

Valle de Guadalupe does not have the appellation rules that regions like Champagne or Rioja live under. No fixed grapes, no required methods, no committee deciding what counts. That absence of rules gets talked about mostly for the freedom it gives individual winemakers to experiment. What it gave Cristina Pino, Daniel Lonnberg, and Sergio Heras was something a little different, room to set their individual labels aside for a moment and build one project together, even though none of them had to. That is what was actually in the glass at the start of the night, even before anyone at the table knew it.