EIGHT MEZCAL NAMES YOU CAN TRUST
A good bottle of mezcal can cost $100 or more. But don’t be intimidated: Your greatest ally is affixed directly to the bottle. By the standards of the liquor industry, the label of most any respectable mezcal is unusually detailed. It should clearly list the distillery’s home village, the mezcalero’s name, the type of agave, the way it was ground, the kind of oven, the wood used for the fire, the type of fermentation vat and yeast, the source of water, the kind of still, the distill date and the number of liters produced. Look for the phrase “Mezcal Artesanal” or “Mezcal Ancestral,” an alcohol content of at least 47% and zero flashy packaging. Instead of trusting a celebrity brand, start with these family-owned producers.
1. ALMA MEZCALERA
Each bottle from Alma reflects a tradition on the edge of extinction. Proprietor Erick Rodriguez is a curator renowned for finding ultra-smallbatch treasures in the Mexican backcountry. He distributes in the US and maintains a secret tasting room in Mexico City, located near the airport so international collectors can try, buy and fly.
2. BURRITO FIESTERO
This remote distillery in Durango operates in the ruins of a 16th century Franciscan hacienda and specializes in native agaves such as Cenizo and Verde. Bottles and labels are made with recycled materials, sawmill scrap is used for the fires, and a new agave is planted for every bottle produced. 3. CASA CORTÉS
Based in Santiago Matatlán, Casa Cortés helped introduce Americans to wild, singlevarietal mezcals with its celebrated El Jolgorio series. It’s now focusing on a new line drawn from individual villages.
4. GUSTO HISTÓRICO
Activist, educator and mezcal legend Marco Ochoa pioneered the modern info-rich label at Mezcaloteca, the world’s first nerd-level mezcal tasting bar, in Oaxaca City. Gusto Histórico focuses on the mezcals produced by several old masters in the famed mezcal town of Miahuatlán.
5. MACURICHOS
In Santiago Matatlán, Gonzalo Martinez and his family produce more than a dozen intensely flavorful mezcals from their organic plots and continuously replant Coyote, Tepeztate, Tobalá and other wild varieties.
6. REAL MINERO
The gold standard of sustainable mezcal,
Real Minero has led the push for reforestation, organic cultivation, local philanthropy and jobs for women. It maintains a seed bank and pollinator garden. And it produces mezcal using clay-pot stills, the tradition in its village of Santa Catarina Minas.
7 . MEZCAL TOSBA 8. ULTRAMUNDO
Artesanal mezcal made from the rare Lamparillo variety on Sergio Garnier’s pristine, 24,000-acre Durango ranch. A minimum of 20% of the agaves are allowed to go to seed each year, and the land is otherwise preserved in its wild state.
plants have provided only a small fraction of the 30 tons of piñas he needs each year.
Cortés agrees that the government is part of the problem. “Right now the government is promoting the culture of mezcal in all these villages that don’t have enough agave,” he says. He has sympathy for the mezcaleros trying to get by, but only up to a point. “If they can’t do it from their own lands, that’s too bad, but they can’t take ours.” He also concedes that the battle is hopeless. “Every month they’re stealing more. They’re destroying these plants that are a fundamental part of our history and culture. We used to see the hillsides covered with yellow agave flowers every year. Now we never see that anymore.”
The situation is critical, says Alfonso Valiente Banuet, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, who works with villages in the reserve to establish agave reforestation programs. In addition to overharvesting, wild agave is threatened by urbanization, cattle ranching and climate change. “Mezcal is produced by using at least 53 species of agaves,” Valiente says. “And the distribution of those agaves is the same as for the columnar cactuses.” The two types of plants form the foundation of the ecosystem and depend on the same pollinators: bats. “We found that the agaves feed the bats for almost seven months of the year,” Valiente says. The other five months of the year, the bats feed on cactus nectar.
The benefits go both ways. As the bats dip their snouts in the flowers to lap the nectar, they get pollen all over their furry faces. And as they feed from flower to flower, they crosspollinate the flowers and fertilize the plants. The fruits and seeds produced not only make more agave and cactuses, but they also feed more than 100 other animal species.
If the agave is removed from the system, Valiente says, the whole thing falls apart. “We did an analysis, and we found that if the agave disappears, that could collapse the ecosystems of central Mexico.” Without agave blossoms to get them through seven months of the year, the bats don’t survive to pollinate the cactus flowers. Soon there are no new generations of cactus or agave, and the desert dies.
“It’s out of control,” says David Suro, a Mexican American restaurateur and co-author of the 2023 book Agave Spirits: The Past, Present and Future of Mezcals, which calls for a return to traditional practices and a focus on quality over quantity. “We’re losing wild agave species every day. If we don’t go back and start to focus on the families that have had the wisdom and the knowledge to take care of the land for millennia, we won’t have agave spirits as we know them in the future.”
Fortunately those families can still be found. And they point the way toward a very different vision of mezcal’s future.
THE SUBTROPICAL
hillsides of Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte aren’t far from the city, but they feel like another planet. Papaya, mango and banana trees shade the villages. Crystal rivers cascade down the slopes. High above, the 10,000-foot peaks are shrouded in dripping cloud forest.
It seems an unlikely place to make mezcal, yet agave flourishes in the humid region, and so has the Mezcal Tosba distillery, a handbuilt brick-and-adobe bungalow clinging to one of those slopes at 2,600 feet. Flanking it, in an ergonomically efficient line, sits a roasting pit lined with river stones, where agave piñas are baked for days over wood coals; a horse-drawn millstone for crushing them; four wooden vats for fermenting the mash, made by a local carpenter out of mountain pine; and four copper alembic stills in brick housing. As smoky wood fires crackle beneath the stills, pure mezcal rises up copper pipes, spirals through a brick cooling basin of river water and spits into plastic jerrycans.
Tosba was founded in 2000 by two Zapotec cousins, Edgar González Ramírez and Elisandro González Molina, as a way to save their region from depopulation. Migration to the US had shrunk the town from 2,800 people to only 1,200, and the two cousins were part of the wave. They moved to the Bay Area in the 1990s to bus tables and tend bar, sending the money back home and worrying about the area’s dependence on remittances from the US. “I just kept thinking there must be another way,” González Molina says. “We were focused on creating something out of these mountains.” They settled on mezcal,
which had been made in the mountains for centuries before disappearing during the diaspora. González Ramírez moved back home to learn the arts of agave cultivation and distillation, and González Molina kept bartending to fund the project.
With limited resources and a climate too humid for some traditional agave varieties, they learned to collect wild seeds and germinate them. When the price of agave skyrocketed, that turned out to be a lucky thing. They started making mezcal in 2012 and today have planted hundreds of thousands of agave plants, including a previously unknown local variety called Warash. “It’s the taste of these mountains,” González Molina says. Every year they plant more than they harvest, letting their best agaves go to seed for future supply.
To prevent erosion, they plant sturdier, faster-growing corn and squash between the agave, mimicking the ancient Mexican milpa system. Because the slopes are too steep for trucks, agave is carried from the fields by burro. Water comes straight from the river. The stills are fired with driftwood collected after the annual floods. Bottles are filled by hand. Solar panels keep the lights on.
Most important to González Molina, Tosba has renewed a culture of entrepreneurship in his region. “We’re creating an economy around mezcal,” he says. Dozens of locals are involved. Some neighbors have revived their farms and planted agave, knowing they have a ready buyer. Others have begun building their own microdistilleries under González Ramírez’s tutelage.
If mezcal is to avoid tequilization and preserve its gusto historico, many more operations will need restoration programs like those at Tosba and Real Minero, which is creating a seed bank of agave varieties for wider distribution in the industry and the wild. But it won’t be easy. Letting some of your agave go to seed, replanting, paying your workers well and crafting small batches all makes traditional mezcal wildly expensive. How many consumers will pay $150 for a premium bottle when they can get a serviceable one for $30?
So far, plenty, says Briggs, the New York wholesaler. “Even just a few years ago, I couldn’t have imagined us being able to sell so many unique small batches,” he says. “Now there’s people asking for them, and supporting those producers. That’s huge.”
Briggs sees a precedent in the world of vineyards, noting that wine lovers have kept the great estates going despite a glut of industrial options. But such an understanding, he adds, often needs to be taught. “More than any category I’ve worked in, mezcal demands a lot of education,” he says. “Consumers have to take that education and run with it.” If that happens, perhaps mezcal’s golden age is just beginning.