The first harvest of wine grapes in Jalisco has been achieved by a company from Sonora.
The firm, known as El Grupo Molina, invested 50,000 dollars per hectare to realize this year’s harvest of 130 hectares of grapes.
According to accepted gospel, to grow grapes good for wine-making, a daily period of significantly lower temperature is requisite. However, Marco Molina Rodriguez, president of the Asociacion de la Uva de Mesa and co-owner of El Grupo Molina, says that his current harvest shatters that viticultural doctrine – in the area where his grapes grow in Jalisco, this wide variation of temperature doesn’t exist.
And according to Hector Padilla Gutierrez, head of the Secretariat of Rural Development, grapes grown in Jalisco would be the earliest to be harvested in the world, seeing as they mature at a moment when the rest of the world’s main wine-growing regions are far from being collection-ready.
While this year only 130 hectares were picked, Molina Rodriguez and co. plan on eventually harvesting grapes from about 500 hectares. He claims that said hectares and the maintenance and harvest they require represent a total of 1,500 jobs. The grapes themselves, mainly of the Sweet Sapphire and Cotton Candy varieties, will be sold here in Mexico, as well as abroad in the United States, Canada, the U.K., China, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, South and Central America, among other countries.