(Munchies.Vice) - It’s midday and I’m sitting in MeroToro restaurant in Mexico City, hearing Chilean (by way of Burgundy) winemaker Louis-Antoine Luyt introduce the concept of natural wines to MeroToro’s enthusiastic waitstaff, including the wines he’s making in Tecate with Jair Téllez, MeroToro’s chef, at the Bichi winery.

Many of the waiters tell me they’d never drunk wine before they started working here. After all, as Luyt explains, “historically, there’s been no culture of drinking wine with food in Mexico.” Most Mexicans drink beer, mezcal, tequila, or aguas frescas to accompany meals. What little wine that was drunk in Mexico was quaffed in smart restaurants by rich people, and they would stick to the big, status-symbol labels from Rioja, Ribera del Duero, and Bordeaux—a far cry from anything that 99 percent of Mexicans could afford. Luyt compares the consumption of these Spanish and French wines to having an iPhone, or before that, wearing blue jeans—part of the mindless accumulation of uniform luxury products, totally devoid of individuality. Now, however, the Mexican wine industry is taking off, and expensive wines from Baja, California sit alongside big Rioja houses on the city’s wine lists. Sadly, however, they offer little respite, as the Mexican wine industry is dominated by a monopoly of omnipresent, industrial producers like Casa Madero, LA Cetto, and Santo Tomás, who have chosen to ape the commercial European and Napa Valley models rather than focus on reflecting Mexico’s exciting and unique terroir.The small producers don’t get a look in.

Luyt and Téllez are, however, mounting their own resistenza naturale (to borrow the title ofJonathan Nossiter’s 2014 wine documentary). They are not only Mexico’s only known natural wine producers, but they are also using the somewhat neglected oldest grape in the Americas:misión. It’s fairly certain that misión came over with the first conquistadores (the clue’s in the name), was tended to by friars, and eventually used not only as sacramental wine but also as an everyday table wine. Yet you mention the misión grape to most people in Europe or the Americas and they probably haven’t heard of it. It’s a deeply unfashionable, folkloric grape that you’ll find a smattering of in all sorts of wines, but it usually doesn’t even get a mention, let alone celebrated in a single-varietal bottling. In Chile, Luyt tells me, there are 400-year-oldmisión vines, and while they’ve yet to find any that old in Mexico, they are certainly lurking dormant somewhere, ready to be nurtured back to life to produce spectacular wine.