Michael SatterfieldOn a recent trip to Baja, Mexico, I had the opportunity to take a guided tour of Baja wine country, which stopped at the Monte Xanic winery just outside of Ensenada. One of the best parts about the trip is that you get to drive your own Jeep in a sort of tourist convoy, while the guide points out historical points of interest over the radio. I opted for the classic Jeep Wrangler over the larger 4-door models so I would only have one passenger.
Baja Wine Country Road Trip
The tour was offered as one of the many shore excursions available at the Ensenada port. Before finding out about the Jeep tour, I had planned to rent a car anyway to drive up, perhaps, and see friends who live in the area, or go on a mini road trip to explore more of Ensenada. The cost per person for the tour was just $80, and a rental car at the dock with insurance would be around $60 for the day, with gas and insurance. The Jeep tour included a guided winery tour and tasting as well as a tequila factory tour and tasting, so I felt like it was a good value.
The first part of the Baja Wine Country tour takes us out of the city to visit some of the smaller farming communities that make up the Ensenada area wine country. Dirt roads and some light trails, but the Jeeps never even needed four-wheel drive, so if you are not an experienced offroader, don’t worry.
About an hour after leaving the dock, we found ourselves entering the grounds of the Monte Xanic estate. While the brand was founded in 1987, some of the vineyards have been producing wine for over 60 years. The winery has seven properties in the Guadalupe Valley, Mexico’s premier wine country, where over 85% of all Mexican wines are produced. Monte Xanic today bottles over 60,000 bottles of wine per year and is one of the most recognizable Mexican wine labels in the world.
The state-of-the-art facility is one of the nicest I have visited in the US or abroad, and the team at Monte Xanic really prides itself on offering a world-class product. This new winery was opened in 2014 and is one of the most modern in the valley, and features a large wine cave (shown below).
Once the tour of the winery was over, we were invited upstairs to sample many of the wines produced by Monte Xanic. My favorites were the white wines; the red was a little too harsh for my taste. But the Chenin Colombard was my favorite of those we sampled, so I purchased a bottle ($12 US) on my way back out to the Jeep. On the way back, we take the highway, which is much faster than the overland route we took to get to wine country, and in about 20 minutes, we find ourselves back in Ensenada and make our way to the parking lot a few blocks away from the ship. I slipped Ricardo, our Baja Wine Country tour guide, a tip and headed to the historic downtown of Ensenada in search of tacos.
This Baja Wine Country tour was booked via the Shore Excursion desk through Carnival Cruises. If you would like more information on this trip, CLICK HERE. If you would like more information on Monte Xanic or to locate a retailer, CLICK HERE.
How did I not know about this option?
I never knew Baja was a wine region
Pretty solid content here…. Maybe add some visuals next time..
More people need to come down here.
Always available for a wine country road trip anywhere.
Good story overall!! You should write about travel more often..
Cool story but it reads more like tourism brochure copy than a true Jeep tour experience. If this was supposed to capture the real Baja vibes, I wanted more edge and fewer flowery descriptions.
If the roads were this intriguing, imagine what the actual Valle de Guadalupe wine routes are like beyond this tour. Has anyone taken this and done side trips to lesser-known vineyards?
Never go on a cruise just drive down from San Diego and save all the risk of being on the ship