What I’m Drinking
2022 Bruma Plan B Sauvignon Blanc
Written by Alejandro, wine writer and travel advisor.
A bottle worth finding.
This Sauvignon Blanc wine poured for course two at Taste of Mexico, the zucchini blossom relleno with heritage cheese and salsa verde. I wanted something fresh enough to follow the oregano and salsa verde without stepping on the cheese, and the 2022 Bruma Plan B did exactly that. It was a quiet pour in a room full of bigger, louder wines, and it did its job without needing to raise its voice.
Quick glance: Fresh, a little herbal, clean acidity.
Citrus and fresh-cut grass up front, a touch of jasmine, a clean, crisp finish. Light on its feet, nothing heavy or overworked about it. The kind of wine that gets out of the way for the food, which is exactly what that course needed.
The Sauvignon Blanc wine and the oak tree it grew up under
Bruma was founded by eight partners in Valle de Guadalupe, and that number shows up everywhere on the property, not just in the paperwork. The winery’s underground barrel room is built beneath a 300-year-old oak tree, and the room itself is held up by eight branches, one for each of the founders who launched the project. Walk down into that space and you are standing under both the tree and the idea at the same time.
The whole property was designed by Mexican architect Alejandro D’Acosta, built from recycled optical glass and wooden slats salvaged from an old San Francisco bridge. It reads less like a typical winery and more like a piece of land art that happens to also make wine, built to sit inside the valley rather than announce itself on top of it.
The winemaker behind it, Lourdes “Lulu” Martínez Ojeda, comes from an Ensenada family whose roots go back to the city’s own founding, hers was one of the thirteen founding families of Ensenada in Baja California. Wine was already part of her family’s story before she ever made a bottle of her own. She still left to learn somewhere else first, training at Château Brane-Cantenac in Margaux, a serious, historic Bordeaux estate, for close to a decade before coming home to build something new in the valley her own family helped start.
That’s the same pattern I keep running into in this valley, someone leaves to learn somewhere old and established, then comes back to build something new in the place they actually came from. It’s the same thread I found running through the Tresparauno story, three winemakers who each crossed a border before landing in the same valley. Valle de Guadalupe seems to keep collecting people this way, not locals who never left, but people who left specifically so they’d have something worth bringing home.
Bruma’s wines have made it onto the list at The French Laundry, which says plenty about where this valley’s reputation actually stands today, whether or not the rest of the world has caught up yet. And the winery’s approach to making it, biodynamic and sustainable farming, minimal intervention in the cellar, roughly forty percent of the fruit grown right on the estate, is built around a simple idea Lulu has described herself: that acidity is where a wine’s elegance actually lives, more than intensity or heavy extraction ever could.
None of that history is why I poured this Sauvignon Blanc wine that night. I poured it because it was the right glass for that plate. But it’s exactly the kind of thing worth knowing once the dinner’s over, a bottle built under a 300-year-old tree, held up by eight branches, made by someone whose family helped build the city the wine now comes from.