Sweet Valley High

Benito Molina emerges from the kitchen, plate in hand, smiling from beneath his signature handlebar moustache. He lays a plate down before us and stands back. On it is a pair of palm-size abalone with iridescent shells, their snail-like bodies making slow, twisting movements, like an underwater dance. “So?” Molina asks, eyebrows lifted over shades, as if to say, “Are you ready for this?”

It’s lunchtime at Molina’s waterfront Muelle Tres restaurant in the fishing-port town of Ensenada. I am here for the second time in three days, having been invited back after an offhand comment made the other night to the effect that I’d never had a truly sublime abalone experience. It bodes well that the restaurant shares space with a local mussel packaging plant.

The abalone is (unsurprisingly) divine and done two ways: steamed and served with a cream and tomato sauce; and cut into little slivers, dusted in corn flour and deep-fried, with a Japanese-style soy dipping sauce. But there’s so much more: local Kumamoto oysters, mussels from next door, halibut served carpaccio-style, ceviche of two clams. We pair all of this with a bottle from nearby Guadalupe Valley wine country: Château Camou Gran Vino Blanco (mostly sauvignon blanc, with some chenin blanc and chardonnay). Then we switch to a bottle of Molina’s house M3, only available at his restaurants, a Zinfandel engineered to stand up to his spicier dishes but not overwhelm them.

Ninety per cent of Mexico’s small but burgeoning wine industry is concentrated here in Baja California, where an arid microclimate, comparable to that of Napa or the Rhône Valley, benefits from cool ocean breezes. Baja’s grape-growing history dates back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when Jesuit priests planted mission grapes. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that today’s thriving scene began to take shape, with the number of wineries jumping from a half-dozen in the ’80s to about 35 today.

Still, there are no vinotherapy spas, golf courses, high-end chain resorts, hot-air balloons or limousine tours in Mexico’s Guadalupe Valley, about a two-hour drive south of San Diego. The roads are notoriously bad, making four-wheel drive a necessity (though the repaving and widening of Highway 3, a.k.a. La Ruta del Vino, has helped). At first glance, the region seems dusty and austere, its hills covered in cacti, parched-looking coastal agave and boulders the size of pickup trucks. But wait, what’s this? An expanse of olive groves and neat rows of vines comes into view, and, suddenly, there’s no mistaking you’re in wine country.