19 February 2026
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At Lunario, a farm-driven tasting menu with One MICHELIN Star and a Green Star, Chef Sheyla Alvarado makes a mole from a harvest’s worth of ingredients: guajillo and ancho chilis, tomatoes, peanuts and sesame seeds, to name just a few.
The result is complex, a thick sauce that’s sweet and spicy and tangy all at once. Finding a pairing for the dish requires careful calculation – to complement all those flavors, Alvarado needs a wine with its own strong personality.
She opts for a tempranillo made minutes away, in the heart of Mexico’s Baja California wine country, on one of the restaurant’s two partner wineries.
“At the winery, we only have single-varietal wines. It's a concept I really like because it allows us to find the truest expression of the grape,” Alvarado says. “The tempranillo grape has this balance that allows it to stand up to mole.”
Mexican wines, most of which come from the dry seaside valleys of the Baja Peninsula, are reaching new heights on the world stage, earning spots on a growing number of fine dining menus and taking home international awards.
As a counterpart to the country’s cuisine, they bring harmony to a meal, with a wide range of styles that can smooth out high heat and acidity.
“What I like about Mexican wine is its diversity. Having so many options makes pairing food much more flexible,” Alvarado says.
Lunario, set on the grounds of the Lomita winery, pulls many of its ingredients from the same fertile valley soil. In a small garden on the property, Alvarado grows fruit trees and rows of vegetables that supply a menu that changes every two months, as new crops take their turn at the top of the haul.
“The Valle de Guadalupe has many microclimates and different soil types, like clay and sand. When applied to wine, this allows us to have many different profiles,” she says. “We are very fortunate to have so many types of valleys, because that gives us a much larger palette of the varieties we can make.”
Below, Alvarado highlights three of her favorite pairings, matching the best of Baja cuisine with the area’s most distinctive wines.
Shrimp sopes and a grenache rosé
Alvarado likes to pair a dish of sopes, a small puck of fried masa, with a grenache rosé from the Lomita winery.
The sope is crowded with sweet and fragrant flavors – including cold-smoked shrimp, a charred carrot purée and pickled bougainvillea flowers – and comes alongside a salsa macha made with peanuts, so the wine works to even out and cool each bite.
“I think grenache is incredibly versatile when you serve it as a rosé, so it allows us to give the customer a little salsa right away and let them go wild adding as much as they want because it holds up well,” Alvarado says.
Mushrooms with mole and a single-varietal tempranillo
Alvarado chooses one of her favorite tempranillos from the Finca La Carrodilla winery as the counterpart to her mole, served over roasted mushrooms with shaved walnuts on top.
“The tempranillo grape has a lot of character that allows us to find a point of balance within all this intensity,” Alvarado says.
Finca La Carrodilla only produces single-varietal wines, meaning wines produced from just one kind of grape that lay claim to all the characteristics of the crop in a particular moment in time.
“We're not talking about blends, we're talking about the vintage, what the vine experienced during that year,” Alvarado says.
Cold tomato soup and a Pét Nat rosé
For a cold tomato soup, served with a bean purée, crispy beans and yogurt, Alvarado recommends a pet nat rosé from nearby winery Duoma.
The sparkling natural wine is part of a small batch from winemakers Carla Figueroa and Eliecer Rodriguez, a young Mexican couple that met in culinary school.
“I feel very privileged that there are three cases and that I can share them with diners and tell them if they want to visit the winery, it's just across the street,” Alvarado says.
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Hero image: View of the vineyard. © Paul Chavez
Thumb image: Sopes © Propiedad De Lunario
