When Spain Banned Wine in New Spain: The History and Its Doubts

Anyone who works with Mexican wine hears the story sooner or later: in 1595, King Philip II (Felipe II) banned wine in New Spain. The decree is said to have ordered that no new vineyards be planted and that existing ones be pulled up, except those of the Church, to protect producers back on the Iberian peninsula. The wine prohibition in New Spain is the great founding tale of national wine, but recent research has cast doubt on important parts of it.

What follows tells both layers: the traditional account, with its edict, its economic reasons and its consequences, and the academic debate about what exactly Philip II prohibited and for whom. At the end, the question that matters to today's drinker: how much of that prohibition explains why Mexican wine is the way it is.

01What exactly did the 1595 edict prohibit?

The traditional account, which even the official Mexican version repeats (the Secretaría de Agricultura, Mexico's agriculture ministry, sums it up this way on its portal), says that in 1595 King Philip II prohibited the planting of new vineyards and the production of wine, and ordered the destruction of existing ones in New Spain. The rule was recorded as Law XVIII of Title XVII of the Recopilación de Leyes de los Reinos de las Indias (Compilation of the Laws of the Kingdoms of the Indies), with an exception for vineyards serving the Church, which needed wine for Mass.

It helps to understand what that Recopilación is: a code that Charles II (Carlos II) approved in 1680 and that gathered thousands of laws issued for the Indies over the previous century. That is why an order from 1595 appears compiled almost a hundred years later, along with its renewals, and read without that context it can look like a single general prohibition.

That the text was compiled is not disputed. What historians debate is who it was addressed to and how much it was applied in New Spain. The debate told below is about that.

The context makes the measure understandable as colonial policy: by the late sixteenth century, the vineyards of New Spain had been producing for decades, the Mission grape had adapted to the territory and local wine was starting to compete with the imported kind. Every bottle made in America was a Spanish bottle that went unsold, and a duty the Crown did not collect.

Before the edict there were also regulations of another kind. From 1529 the authorities received warnings about the fermented drinks that Indigenous peoples made, and in 1545 prohibitions were confirmed on certain local wines (vinos de tierra) and their sale, on public order and religious grounds (Divergencias, 2024). In that reading, the 1595 prohibition was the biggest blow of a control policy with a long past.

02Why did Spain want to ban American wine?

The short answer: mercantilism. The colonial system worked as a closed circuit, with the colonies producing raw materials and Spain selling them finished goods, and wine was one of the goods in that circuit. According to the El Financiero column (2023), the merchants who controlled trade with the Indies from Seville pressed to shut down colonial competition.

The logic has to be understood without romance. Banning local production to protect metropolitan exports was standard policy of the era, not a special cruelty toward wine. The same was tried with other colonial manufactures. What is peculiar about the winegrowing case is how much of today's geography of Mexican wine is attributed to it.

There was also a direct tax ingredient: the Crown collected duties on the wine that crossed the Atlantic, and that income depended on the colonies not supplying themselves. Protecting the winemakers of the peninsula and protecting the royal treasury were, in practice, the same policy with two names.

03What does the historians' debate say?

An academic work on the history of winegrowing in the Americas, available in the open archive HAL, holds that the evidence for a systematic prohibitive policy by the Crown is scant, and that the 1595 edict, the instructions from Philip II to Luis de Velasco, referred to the residents and inhabitants of Peru. The detail fits the calendar: Velasco, who had been viceroy of New Spain, was named viceroy of Peru in June 1595. The real problem, according to that work, was Peruvian wine production, which competed with Spanish exports. The renewals of 1610 and 1631, and their entry in the Recopilación, would have been aimed at Peru as well.

In that reading, the instructions addressed to the viceroys of New Spain do not mention the vine, and production in New Spain was a minor matter in the eyes of the metropolis. The same work holds that the prohibition came after the early failure of winegrowing in central Mexico and that it did not keep the vine from developing in the north of the viceroyalty during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The two versions coexist like this: the edict existed and was compiled as a law of the Indies. What is debated is its reach and its effective application in New Spain. The El Financiero column itself warns that the history of wine is full of documents that contradict each other. That is why this note tells both layers.

04How did Mexican wine survive the prohibition?

Through three cracks that the edict could not or would not close. The first was religious: the Church needed wine for the Eucharist, so vineyards serving worship were exempted. In the missions of Baja California, the vine accompanied the mission system built from the late seventeenth century, according to the INAH (the National Institute of Anthropology and History) studies cited in the story of the Mission grape.

The logic of the exception was hard to refute from Madrid: without wine there was no Mass, and without Mass there was no evangelization, which was the justification for the colonial presence in the territory.

The second crack was geographic: New Spain was immense and the viceregal bureaucracy was limited. In the remote north, control was looser, because the Crown had a bigger problem there than wine: keeping the frontiers populated. That is where the Baja California region and the Coahuila region sit today, two of the zones with the most winegrowing history in the country.

The third crack was Parras. The valley owes its name to the wild vines the settlers found (parras means grapevines). In 1598 the Misión de Santa María de las Parras was founded there, and a year earlier, on August 19, 1597, the governor of Nueva Vizcaya had granted Lorenzo García, with the authorization of Philip II, land and permission to plant vines and make wine and aguardiente (a distilled spirit). On that land grant (merced) the Hacienda de San Lorenzo was born, today Casa Madero, which on the strength of that document presents itself as the oldest winery in the Americas. Two years after the edict, the king was authorizing a vineyard in Coahuila in writing. The note on the wineries of Parras de la Fuente tells how to visit that cradle.

The land grant and the edict can sit side by side. The law was general, but the Crown kept granting individual permits to those who asked for them and justified them. And if the edict was aimed at Peru, as the debate holds, the grant stops being a contradiction. In any case, the prohibition was never an even wall, and a good part of the history of Mexican wine passed through those exceptions.

The hacienda changed hands many times. It had thirteen owners before 1893, when Evaristo Madero traveled to Europe to buy the San Lorenzo-Mexique company and, with it, the property that today carries his family's name.

05What consequences did it have for today's wine?

The traditional account attributes three legacies to it that are still mentioned when talking about Mexican wine:

• A delay. While Chile and Argentina professionalized their winegrowing in the nineteenth century, Mexico came late to modernization. The professionalization of the national industry is, in essence, a twentieth-century phenomenon (Vinos y Licores, 2025).
• A map of the north. Winegrowing concentrated where colonial control was weak: Baja California and Coahuila, and later the Bajío.
• A small-scale tradition. Centuries of home or religious production left a relationship with wine with little industry. Some see a continuation of that craft in the natural wine wineries that now work old plots with minimal intervention.

06Where can you walk through that history?

The route of the prohibition can be walked. In Parras de la Fuente, Casa Madero receives visitors at the Hacienda de San Lorenzo, where the tour enters the oldest areas of the cellar, with presses from 1808. The profiles of the Coahuila region list the other wineries of the valley. In Baja California, the Museo de la Vid y el Vino (Museum of the Vine and Wine), in Guadalupe Valley (Valle de Guadalupe), has a history room that runs from the missionaries to today's winemaking.

If the visit coincides with the calendar, the wine events listing on this site gathers the harvest festivals. And every October 7, Mexican Wine Day offers another reason to raise a glass with a bottle from the regions in this story.

Another stop, in Mexico City: a wine shop that specializes in Mexican wine, of the kind our places (in Spanish) guide gathers. Asking for a bottle from Parras or Baja California and asking about the history of the house is a good way to follow this story.

The wine prohibition in New Spain is two stories at once: that of the edict that was compiled as law, and that of the debate over who it was aimed at and how far it reached. To follow the thread, the story of the Mission grape is the previous chapter, and the guide to the wine routes of Mexico is the map of what came after.