Camino Real Winery & Taproom

The winery stands on the left side of Tome Hill Road, just below Tomé Hill, south of Los Lunas. Four acres of vineyard surround it, holding 2,400 vines of grapes suited to the New Mexico climate: Chambourcin, Leon Millot, Golden Muscat, Isabella, Crimson Cabernet, Brianna and Chardonelle. The winery has a tasting room with a patio outside. Tours of the vines and the winery are by appointment. Jon and Dolores Chavez own the place and make the wine.

The bottles carry a painting by Carla Sanchez of Tomé. It shows a caravan carrying wine north along the Camino Real to the missions.

Twelve wines and a tap

The winery’s list runs to twelve wines: Rio Blanco and Rio Rojo, Riesling and Reserve Riesling, Onate Gold, Vino de Tome, Vino de Gloria, Baco Noir, Barbera, Chambourcin, a Late Harvest Milot, and a Cranberry Mead. There are reds, whites and meads, in dry and sweet styles. The winery says its wines blend varieties “with grapes harvested right from this very soil,” in what its site calls the oldest wine-growing region of the U.S. The village’s 2020 visitors guide lists the place as Camino Real Winery & Tap Room. The guide sends visitors there for the wine or for a New Mexico craft beer on tap, with local musicians playing. The winery also takes its bottles out to events through the year, which its calendar describes as running “from festivals to art classes.”

The medals began in the first year. A Vino de Tome took bronze at the 2012 New Mexico State Fair. By 2014 the winery’s awards page listed more: a gold for Chambourcin at the State Fair, a gold for a Merlot at the Florida International Wine Competition, and a silver for the Cranberry Mead at the Finger Lakes International Wine Competition in New York. That year the winery also received the State Fair’s Premiere Vintners Award.

The hill and the road below it

Tomé Hill rises about 400 feet above the valley. A 2022 piece from the New Mexico Tourism Department says the hill holds more than 1,800 petroglyphs, left by Ancestral Pueblo people who held ceremonies and prayers there. The same piece says the hill later served as a marker for the Spanish traveling El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. On Good Friday, pilgrims climb to the stone shrine and the trio of crosses that Edwin Berry erected at the top in 1947.

The winery’s own history page tells the story of the road it is named for, drawing on Camino Real Heritage.org. Juan de Oñate’s expedition crossed the Rio Grande at today’s El Paso in early 1598, went on through the Jornada del Muerto to San Juan Pueblo, and reached Santa Fe in 1603. For 300 years, the page says, El Camino Real was the only road into New Mexico and the Southwest. Its use declined after the railroad arrived in the mid-1880s, and most historians date the road’s use from 1598 through 1885. Automobiles revived it for a short time in the early 1900s, when it served as the first highway from El Paso to Santa Fe. The page names I-25 as today’s Camino Real. A traveler from Albuquerque reaches the winery on it, heading south to exit 215 and then onto N.M. 47.

Jon and Dolores Chavez, December 15, 2012

The Chavezes founded the winery on December 15, 2012. Their account describes the Valencia valley, the Rio Abajo, as once known for vast wine production. It places the winery in a valley “historically known for the harvesting of some of the best mission wine grapes of long ago.” By the same account, Jon Chavez was a winemaker of 12 years. The founders gave the winery a secondary goal of promoting growth and tourism in Valencia County. Edible Santa Fe featured the winery in August 2014, and the site announced a wine club for 2015.

The tasting room has also hosted the valley’s own occasions. On March 2, 2019, the family of Paul Aragon held a fundraising party there, with live auctions and a raffle. Aragon was a Los Lunas general contractor who had just received a double lung transplant in Phoenix. In 2020, Camino Real Winery, Inc. was among 87 Valencia County businesses awarded CARES Act relief grants, and its share was $9,500.

Hail, oak chips and a garage

An earlier account names different people at the start. It ran in the Valencia County News-Bulletin, and the winery reposted it on its site in July 2014. The story follows Santos Griego and Jonathan Chavez, two wine growers who had been introduced to winemaking nearly eight years before and were “bitten by the bug.” Their enterprise, already called Camino Real Winery, stretched from Tomé to south of Belen. It had a small experimental vineyard at Chavez’s home and fermentation vats in Griego’s climate-controlled garage three miles south. It also drew on four acres of grapes off N.M. 47 owned by Henry Jaramillo, who had grown grapes on the sandy llano above the river for 26 years. According to the paper, the three men had partnered to bring winemaking back to Valencia County.

Jaramillo explained why the old vineyards were gone. “Grapes — they don’t like a lot of standing water around their roots,” he said. “Around the turn of the century, there was a lot of flooding here, and it wiped out most of the vineyards.”

In the August before the story ran, a late summer hailstorm left the partners with shredded vines and pulped fruit. “There wasn’t anything left,” Griego said. “We didn’t get to harvest anything.” The next harvest came from vines planted three years earlier, and friends and family helped pick it bucket by bucket. The juice went into 20-gallon tanks. The white wine, sprinkled with oak chips, would be ready by Christmas, but the red could take years. While they waited on a master wine growers’ license from the state, they were limited to 200 gallons a year for personal use and gifts.

Griego described the winery he wanted to build: a mission-style adobe building with photovoltaic power, windmills, and fermenting tanks cooled by water drawn from the aquifer. With all that in place, he said, the only thing they would have to leave for was potato chips. “And we can probably make those ourselves too.”

The partners planned a day-long seminar that October for anyone who wanted to grow grapes. They estimated that five good producing vines would make five gallons of wine. “I would love to see vines in every yard up and down (Highway) 47,” Griego said.