Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken’s Mandalay Bay restaurant offers a nice selection of wines from Mexico, and will host a festival on October 25.
“Mexican wine? Is that even a thing?”
Those words, or something quite similar, were my first response when Border Grill’s regional manager, Yancy Perez, mentioned the restaurant’s upcoming Mexican Food and Wine Festival (October 25, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.).
I’m admittedly no oenophile. But I’ve visited a lot of Las Vegas restaurants and leafed through more than my share of wine lists. I could easily name a dozen or more restaurants with enough French and Napa Valley vintages to fill a large book because I’ve stared confusedly at many of those books. And I could even recommend some excellent local restaurants that offer amazing selections of Italian, Spanish or even Greek wines. But the wines of Mexico have not, in my limited experience, been embraced by many of our valley’s restaurants.
Border Grill, however, has. So I invited Perez onto the Food and Loathing podcast to discuss it with me and my co-host, Samantha Gemini Stevens.
“This stuff’s really good.”
My first inquiry was about Mexico’s history as a wine-making nation.
“They’ve been producing wine in Mexico for hundreds of years; it just wasn’t that great,” Perez conceded before adding an important caveat.
“Fast forward to, let’s say, eight years ago, seven years ago, you’re getting these winemakers that trained in Italy, France, Napa, and they’re coming back to Mexico.”
Perez first became aware of this phenomenon when his bosses, celebrity chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, sent him to a Wine Boot Camp in Mexico. His expectations weren’t high, but he quickly sensed that something was going on in the sector.
“I started tasting wines, and I was like, ‘Man, this stuff’s really good,’” he says.
Six months later, when the Border Grill team was planning another trip to Central Mexico, he was determined to see what others thought.
“So I called two of the old sommeliers I used to work with, and I was like, ‘Hey, can you guys come down here and see if I’m crazy, or is this stuff pretty good?’
“And they came down with me. We started tasting. They were working for a distribution company here in town. And all of a sudden, they picked up a bunch of wines. They were like, ‘This stuff is really good!’”
Diverse Terroir, Familiar Grapes
According to Perez, one of the most exciting regions of Mexico for wines is the Valle de Guadalupe, sometimes called the Napa of Mexico.
“It’s inside mountains and valleys, 15 minutes away from the Pacific Ocean, so you get the saltiness from the ocean there.”
However, he quickly adds that connoisseurs shouldn’t sleep on wines from Central Mexico.
“They have terroir from a rainforest to a desert, hot in the day, cool at night, keeping the acidity in the grapes. So they’re producing some really good white wines and bubbles in Central Mexico now, playing with reds [and] great rosés. And one thing I love about Mexico is they have no rules right now, so they can mix whatever they want, blend it, and make really good wine.”
Taste For Yourself
Today, Border Grill’s wine list is almost exclusively Mexican, with a dozen red, white, rosé and sparkling varieties, house wines of unspecified origin, and a sole French-style Champagne. The Mexican offerings are made from familiar grapes: chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, merlot, malbec, Nebbiolo, and Sangiovese. But the prices ($13 – $21/glass and $65 – $105/bottle) are bargains by Las Vegas Strip standards.
While my wine palate isn’t sophisticated enough to judge the quality of the many wines Perez poured during our interview, my co-host seemed impressed. You can hear all of our comments on the episode.
But the best way to learn about the topic is to try these wines yourself. And you’ll get the chance on October 25 at the First Annual Mexican Food and Wine Festival.
The event will run from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Early bird tickets are available for $100 (plus tax, tip and fees) through the first week of September and $125 afterward through Open Table.
“I have 19 wineries,” Perrez says of the evening. “We’ll have tray-passed hors d’oeuvres, food stations, live music, and we’re ready to rock and roll with this.”
