A long weekend in Baja California

Wine tasting, delicious food, and ATVing in Valle de Guadalupe.

barbacoa tacos to start our wine tasting day

Earlier this month, I was with my family in the San Diego area, hanging out in a town called Del Mar that I’ve been going to my whole life. The Mexican border is about a half hour south of town, and while I’ve taken a few day trips to Tijuana, I’ve never explored further into Baja California.

Baja California is home to Valle de Guadalupe, a wine region that produces the majority of Mexico’s wine. The area is mountainous and dry, and has a similar climate to the Mediterranean. Wine making and its associated tourism have exploded in recent years, and the area is now has over 150 wineries, boutique hotels, and a lot of high end dining.

We spent about 4 days there which is enough time to get a feel for the area but not so many days that you get wined-out. Below are some of the highlights of the trip, and I’ve added all the places we went and a bunch of places I’d like to visit in the future to my Baja list on Google Maps. Later this week, I’ve got a handful of Baja-inspired recipes for paid subscribers to kick off Memorial Day Weekend.

wine tasting in Valle de Guadalupe

For a very obvious reason (avoiding drunk driving) and maybe a less obvious one (for translation help), hiring a guide to drive you around to different wineries is highly suggested. There are a lot of options, but I found Baja Tour Guide in the comments section of Reddit and he turned out to be great! We collaborated on places to visit based on my research and his connections, and we had a great day of tasting natural wines and meeting winemakers.

We visited Anatolia, Azizam, and Vinos Pijoan on our Friday tour, and also visited Bichi and Vena Cava on our own. There are growing number of natural wine producers in the area, but many don’t have tasting rooms or don’t do tastings at all. I reached out to Bichi and Azizam on my own, but a tour guide can likely also help coordinate.

scenes from Bloodlust Wine Bar

Bloodlust is a natural wine bar and restaurant that shows up on a lot of lists because they have awesome food, a great wine and cocktail list, and very cool architecture. I had planned to go here at some point in the weekend, but we came here as our last stop on our wine tasting tour, and it was a nice way to casually end the day.

an epic salsa bar, LOCA wine bar, raw tuna in Ensenada

Ensenada is large town about a half hour away that’s home to a large port, a lot of seafood, a few breweries, and increasingly, some nice wine and cocktail bars. We got a lot of seafood, margaritas at Hussong’s Cantina (apparently the inventors), natural wine at LOCA, and food and beers at brew pub Aguamala. Those spots and a few more are bookmarked on my Baja list.

ATVing | rotisserie chicken

I found an ATV winery tour on TripAdvisor and it was so fun. You basically drive around the backroads of the area and eventually end up at a winery to eat food or taste wine. It’s about 2 hours and was a great way to get a sense of the area.

There are a lot of great places to eat in Valle, from Michelin stars to roadside tacos. A lot of the same places tend to get recommended, but we also got some great suggestions by literally just pulling up google or asking around. One of the best things we ate was at Pollos El Retorno, a road side rotisserie chicken stand. Eat it there or take it to go and sit on a patio with a bottle of wine. Highly, highly recommend.

local tuna crudo & grilled tri-trip steak

A few bonus San Diego recommendations:

The Tuna Dockside Market is an open air fish market in the San Diego harbor. You can get hyper local and seasonal fish, and pair it with seasonal produce from the Little Italy Famers’ Market that’s located nearby. Don’t skip on the famous tri-tip from Cardiff Seaside Market, about a half hour north in Cardiff. If you’re in town and plan to be cooking, these are a must visit.

A few other pieces of info:

• La Cocina de Doña Esthela shows up on nearly every list of places to visit for breakfast, but the morning we visited it was so outrageously packed, we had to pivot to somewhere else. A few other brunch places seemed to be similarly popular. It was a holiday weekend in Mexico so I’m sure that’s why it was so packed, but I’d still be prepared to wait or maybe try during the week.

• If you’re renting a car, only a few places will let you drive your car into Mexico, so make sure you double check. It’s also strongly advised you get Mexican car insurance. Hertz requires you to get theirs, but if you can use a third party, Baja Bound came up a lot in my research.

• If you drive down the coast from the border crossing in San Ysidro, there are a few tolls that do not take cards, but they do take American dollars (and give back change in USD).

• Most places took US dollars, but they didn’t always give change in USD. You can get away with just USD, but in hindsight, I should have had pesos on hand for smaller taco shops and roadside stands.

• If you have Global Entry, we were told that you “shouldn’t have a problem” using the Sentri Lane to drive back into the US. Online it says you have to register your car to do that, and you can’t register a rental car, but the border agent didn’t seem to think it would actually be an issue.