Gruet Winery of Albuquerque
As a New Mexican transplant, I have a pretty fierce pride about what happens here. Sure – you’d hardly blink an eye at the idea of an award winning winnery in Northern California. But New Mexico? Seriously – I still field this question when I call customer support for various products: “…New Mexico? That’s in the U.S.?” There are no major metropolitan cities, and the landscape is primarily desert, both high and low, where the key landscaping tenets come down to “xeriscaping”, or “it’s amazing what you can do with just about no water at all”. Turns out, viticulture, most specifically of the champagne variety, likes that just fine.
And it’s a point of pride that when traveling, and enjoying that fancy big city night out, the wine list invariably features at least one New Mexican wine. Not because it’s a novelty, but because it really is that good: Gruet sparkling wine. The Gruet family – themselves transplants from their native Champagne region of France, moved here in the early 1980’s with vines and dreams. This year they celebrate their 25th anniversary of making a wine that was cited by Wine Spectator in 2011 as No. 43 of the top 100 best wines in the world.
For this story for Local Flavor, it was fascinating to gain backstage access to one of our premier winemaker’s vineries, capture a salut between celebratory siblings Nathalie and Laurent in front of the silver silos, and especially to work with the classic mist that swirls from a just-opened, chilled, bottle of fine champagne….
Gruet Winery of New Mexico celebrates their 25th silver anniversary this year
Although the vineyards are in Truth or Consequences, the Gruet winery is in Albuquerque, custom built expressly for the purpose of making Champagne.
The winery features a gallery of antique wine making tools… they’re beautiful, if slightly reminiscent of mediaeval torture contraptions…
Albuquerque is greener than you might think – these lush vines that flourish in front of the winery grow less than a city block from Interstate highway I25…
