Annals of Alcohol April 4, 2016 Issue
Mezcal Sunrise
Searching for the ultimate artisanal distillate.
By Dana Goodyear
“Mezcal makes you cry, sing, dance, hug the neighbor you just met an hour ago.”Credit Illustration by Bjorn Lie
Bricia Lopez is the mezcal queen of Los Angeles. Five years ago, Lopez, who is thirty-one and imposingly savvy, persuaded her father to let her build a mezcal bar at Guelaguetza, the restaurant that he opened when the family moved north from Oaxaca, a center of mezcal culture, in the mid-nineties. He didn’t know if Americans would like mezcal, or if Mexicans would admit that they did. But he decided to trust Bricia, and she focussed her offerings on premium mezcals—high proof, small lots, no worm. At that point, there were only a handful of brands on the market. Since then, mezcal imports have spiked, and labels have proliferated. Lopez now carries thirty. When I visited her at the bar the other day, she was in the midst of a renovation, doubling its size.
Some of Lopez’s earliest memories of life in Mexico involve the barbecue-sauce smell of cooked agave that pervaded her father’s tourist shop, where she and her brother sat on a cement floor, racing worms and tying little packets of sal de gusano to bottles of the family mezcal. Her job, at six, was to run out to the square and draw the tourists in. She is still an expert marketer: many influential L.A. bartenders thank Lopez for giving them their first taste of quality mezcal, in the form of a small bottle, sourced from Oaxaca by her dad and sealed by her with wax that she bought at Staples. Her identity is so deeply intertwined with the spirit that people call her Goddess Mayahuel, the Aztec deity of agave, whose children are sometimes figured as four hundred drunken rabbits. She prefers to keep her references bicultural. Around her neck, she wears a gold necklace that says “Mezcalifornian,” in gangster script.
Mezcal is a distilled spirit, and can be made from some thirty varieties of agave, or maguey. It is typically produced by farmers using a laborious and antiquated method, at primitive distilleries known as palenques, and sold or shared in villages to mark births, funerals, and everything in between. Contrary to popular belief, it does not induce hallucinations. Originally, “mezcal” was a generic term, like “wine,” for a spirit produced all over Mexico. Tequila, a two-billion-dollar global business, is just a style of mezcal; developed in the state of Jalisco, it is made from a single variety, the blue agave, using a largely industrialized process, and consumed on spring break in the form of slammers. Often mixed with other alcohols and enhanced with caramel coloring, tequila can also pick up flavors from the wood in which it is aged—sometimes spent whiskey barrels bought from the United States.
Traditionally, the agaves used for mezcal are roasted in an underground pit, wild-fermented in open vats, and distilled to proof, yielding a punchy, petroly, funky spirit that is thought to be a uniquely eloquent expression of terroir. Regulations allow the proof to fall between 72 and 110—but hard-liners hold that anything lower than 90 isn’t “real” mezcal. There is scarcely a serious cocktail menu in a major American city that does not feature a mezcal drink—at least three have been named for Lopez—and more and more restaurants offer lists of obscure varietals, at twenty to thirty dollars for a two-ounce pour, as if they were wines from the Loire. Lopez’s father, like many of his compatriots, is stunned by the turn in mezcal’s fortune. In his time, producers emulated tequila and did what they could to compete with it, adding a worm for flavor and to distinguish their bottle on the shelf. Now tequila companies are looking for mezcal and emphasizing the simplicity and rusticity of their product whenever possible. “We tried to sophisticate mezcal, but it turned out that people like traditional things the most,” he told me.
The mezcal boom coincides with the popularity of farm-to-table food, the rise of the craft cocktail, and the advent of the bartender as an advocate for environmental and social justice. Lopez told me, “Mezcal hits every magic word—artisanal, organic, gluten-free, vegan. It comes from a small village, and you have to drive there to get it. It’s made by a family. It automatically became cool when knowing what you eat became cool. Tequila got to the point where it’s like Tyson chicken—that’s Cuervo. Now I want to know my chicken’s name. That’s mezcal.”
Mezcal’s ascent is both a victory for those who love it and a cause for concern. The grains for whiskey are planted and harvested each year; grapes are perennials. But most agaves—succulents, kin to asparagus—resist domestication. Espadín, one of the easiest to grow, takes up to a decade to mature, and each piña—the usable core, stripped of its spiky blades—yields only about ten bottles of mezcal. Prized wild varieties can take longer and yield less. Tobalá, a tiny, feisty plant that grows under oaks on high-altitude slopes and secretes an enzyme that breaks down granite, needs as many as fifteen years, and gives up about two bottles of mezcal per piña. Tepeztate ripens over a quarter century. The desire to consume a botanical time capsule is fraught; every precious sip both supports a traditional craft and hastens its extinction. “I truly believe mezcal will be big everywhere, because it’s delicious,” Josh Goldman, a Los Angeles bar consultant, told me. “Though there may be a subconscious thing going on—see it or eat it before it’s gone.”
“It says the cost of the flight went up because we acknowledged its existence.”
Celebrities like Bing Crosby helped make tequila famous in mid-century America, but mezcal was a spirit for the highbrow underground. Cooper was a frequent guest of Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, art collectors who were behind Gemini G.E.L., a printmaking studio that championed L.A. artists. “William Burroughs is there,” Cooper recalled. “Rauschenberg is there. Tony Berlant is there. Larry Bell is there. Everyone from the L.A. art world is there, and I got the good stuff and we’re all drinking it and we’re having a good time. And then it goes to the in-group in New York—Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson.” In 1990, he said, “I had some ****-you money from a couple of large commissions” and spent six months in Oaxaca. He gave himself permission to explore different media, and came to see his buzz as a work of art. “A work of art transforms the viewer,” he said. “Mezcal gave me all these incredible, humorous thoughts—transformation.”
In 1995, Cooper began exporting mezcal to the United States under the name Del Maguey, emphasizing the agave varietals in each batch and the village of origin. (The artist Ken Price painted all the labels.) Cooper invited influential bartenders to Oaxaca and took them to the villages to meet the mezcaleros who were adhering to methods passed down by their great-great-grandfathers. He fed his guests barbacoa, and taught them to say stigibeu, a Zapotec word for “cheers.” Last year, he says, he sold fifty thousand six-bottle cases. But it isn’t like it was. “I could take the best shit to the U.S. without anybody checking it—it was pristine, naïve, pure bliss,” he told me. “I converted people one person at a time, nose to nose. I created this whole market, and until three years ago I owned the whole ****ing deal.”
It was only a matter of time before someone recognized the potential of artisanal mezcal and scaled it up. In 2013, Fausto Zapata, an entrepreneur from Los Angeles, launched a brand called El Silencio, an approachable mezcal aimed at mainstream American drinkers—in Scotch terms, a smooth, honeyed Oban rather than a peat monster like Laphroaig. “We’re the slick ones—as much a marketing company as a mezcal company,” he says. “We’re elevating into a pop-culture phenomenon something that people like seeing as niche.” Jeremy Piven is an investor; El Silencio is featured in Aeromexico’s first-class lounge.
Zapata grew up in Mexico City, drinking tequila-and-Sprite to give himself nerve when he went out to the clubs; as he grew older, he took road trips to Oaxaca, in search of something authentic, mythic, and cool, and found mezcal. His sipper is an 80-proof combination of wild and farmed agaves; his mixing mezcal, an 86-proof Espadín, comes in a bottle the matte-black color of the Batmobile. He sold ten thousand cases last year, and hopes to double that in 2016. “We want to create a global brand,” he told me. “You don’t just drink single malt in a village in Scotland, or sake in Japan.”
“Either those ducks are dead or we’re standing upside down in a lake.”
David Suro-Piñera, an artisan tequila maker who advocates for mezcal, told me that many of the distillers who would be most affected are illiterate, economically marginal, and live in communities where there is no Internet. To him, the motive behind the proposed law was clear: big companies, especially tequila makers, were threatened by the rising popularity of all things agave. They didn’t want to be blindsided the way that large beer companies were by microbrews, which now control some twelve per cent of a multibillion-dollar industry. It was of a piece, he said, with the rest of colonial history. “When the Spaniards arrived in the Americas, they prohibited the production of alcoholic beverages by the indigenous people. When are they going to let these people alone?”
One morning in Oaxaca, I went to see Hipócrates Nolasco, the president of the Consejo Regulador del Mezcal, the advisory body that administers the holograms. A chemist with a Ph.D. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Nolasco works out of a laboratory where young technicians in lab coats test samples from hundreds of palenques, verifying proof and checking for levels of methanol and other volatile compounds in a gas-chromatography machine. Music blared from a radio, and flasks of yellow and clear liquid were strewn about the benches. Along the wall was a stencilled motif of a green agave plant with a chemical flask in place of the piña. The lab, which Nolasco ran until 2013, is a private business; mezcal companies pay twelve hundred pesos to test each batch, a necessary step before the C.R.M. can approve it for sale.
Thirty-eight and baby-faced, Nolasco wears cowboy boots and golf shirts. His office, separated from the lab by glass panels, is a museum of mezcal. Hundreds of bottles—his personal collection—line the walls on mirrored shelves. In a conference room appointed with red leather chairs, Nolasco offered me a drink of javelí, his favorite varietal—“It’s afternoon in Europe,” he said, smiling. He comes from a sorghum-farming family, in a part of Oaxaca that does not produce mezcal. His appreciation stems from his training as a scientist. He pushed a button, releasing a screen from the ceiling, and showed me a presentation of side-by-side chromatographs of mezcal and other major spirits. The line for mezcal jittered along the x-axis, jumping up dramatically every inch or two—the chemical profile of mezcal can include furfural, which carries hints of bread, nuts, and caramel, and napthalene, a hydrocarbon that lends a note of tar. Vodka’s line, by comparison, was stolid and straight, featureless as snow.
He explained to me how the proposed regulations, which he helped craft, would protect the growing prestige of mezcal, as well as consumers. “We are all agave distillates,” he said, explaining that the use of the term “agave” by uncertified and possibly unscrupulous distillers encroached on the D.O. In December, he said, the C.R.M. conducted a study of the marketplace and found that nearly half the mezcals for sale were illegitimate—untested fakes, any one of which could have been contaminated with methanol. “It takes only twelve millilitres of methanol to go blind,” he said. “In the best case, when you drink a fake you will get a bad impression. You will get a bad hangover. You can have a bad party. And then you think that is mezcal. We are very jealous about what we can call real mezcal. It’s the most expensive exported beverage in Mexico right now—it costs three times as much per bottle as tequila—but one problem could be catastrophic.”
During his four years at the C.R.M., Nolasco said, he’d brought many mezcaleros into compliance. But it was hard going. “You confront a lot of factors,” he told me. “Resistance, laziness, no interest in innovation, no interest in a new challenge.” The scoundrels, he suggested, were not the producers but the middlemen who brought uncertified spirits to consumers. “They avoid all the taxes,” he said. “They hide behind the idea that they are helping a poor farmer. They sell it in bars and restaurants, and they even export it without permission. The worst are the ones who pay less here but sell the ultra-expensive bottles for two hundred dollars in the United States. It’s a very good business being outside the law.”
* chef formerly worked at Saison, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco, and the menu—which emphasized “local, artisanal, organic” food—was designed to be ephemeral. The walls were painted with murals of wild agave varietals, accompanied by their common and their scientific names. Cox, who graduated from Denison University, with a degree in politics, philosophy, and economics, is wiry and sharp-featured and has an asymmetrical haircut that flops in his face, flustering him like a yearling with an unruly forelock. For much of the past year, he has studied mezcal aggressively; after visiting dozens of palenques, he assembled a menu of obscure offerings, which he buys wholesale in plastic jugs and bottles in a back room.
Having recently discovered mezcal, Cox feels fiercely protective of its future; given the shortage of raw material, its popularity scares him. “I don’t give a shit about the common person who thinks mezcal is a smoked tequila,” he said. “It’s not a drink to buy in clubs. This is limited! It should be consumed by people who know what they’re talking about.”
Cox presented his favorite: an earnest glass bottle with an agave-fibre label. “This one’s fermented in cowhide,” he said. It was wonderfully weird and comforting, salty-sweet and leathery, like Old Spice on a beloved cheek. I turned the bottle around and read the name of the maker, “Maestro Mezcalero: Alvarado Álvarez.” Cox said that he went to the source, a tiny village called Santa María Ixcatlán, every other month to pick up an allotment of about twenty-six litres; it happened that he was going the next day. As for the pending regulations, he said, the mezcalero, whose full name was Amando Alvarado Álvarez, didn’t care at all. “He’s going to sell it whatever the **** you call it. You can call it piss water, for all he cares.”
Early the next morning, Lopez picked up Cox and me in her father’s Jeep. Cox had cash in his pocket, and a jug that he stowed in the back. We drove for three hours, through high-desert plains weird with Joshua trees and forests of oak festooned with air plants, like Christmas trees in a hotel lobby. The road dipped and rose, and we entered Ixcatlán through a colorful gate. The streets were empty, the cathedral flanked by bare cement galleries where pilgrims camp during the town’s main festival. We stopped at Alvarado’s mother’s house for lunch—tortillas made from her own corn, eaten in the kitchen while love songs played on the radio.
The palenque was at the edge of a bio-reserve, high in the mountains, twenty miles from where the tropics begin. We got out and walked down a little slope, past a pile of singed agaves to a covered structure on the side of a hill above a streambed. The air was heavy. Alvarado crouched beside a small clay pot with a bamboo pipe poking from its side which emptied into a clay jug. The space was rigged with an ingenious network of angled bamboo sluices, which, Swiss Family Robinson-style, used gravity to bring cool water to the stills. Three hides full of fermenting must bowed from tree-pole frames lashed together with rope. Cox stepped up for a closer look. “This is raw, man!” he said. “Fresh leather.”
** apiece.
Lopez asked Alvarado how he usually sold. Wholesale, he said, or through a nonprofit brand associated with the bio-reserve, which gave him young agaves that he could plant as part of a reforestation effort. That brand, supported by an ex-governor of Oaxaca, was certified, but he chose to keep the rest of his output outside the reach of the C.R.M.; the hologram was too costly. He did not like to charge too much, lest high prices fuel a gold rush on the agave. “If you want to take it with you in your stomach, it’s free,” he said.
“I’ll never change the way I’m making this, but if here in Ixcatlán I had to say ‘booze’ or ‘liquor,’ as opposed to ‘mezcal,’ people would be scared away by it.” He was contemplating giving his product a name in Ixcatec, a language that fewer than ten living people speak. “Maybe it’s wrong that I stay away from everything,” Alvarado said. “I’m trying to join the movement. I want to fight for the rights of the mezcaleros to respect the right traditions, so the C.R.M. doesn’t make laws to change the process.” He said that an official had been out to see him, and had recommended that he store his mezcal not in plastic jugs but in barrels, which would change the flavor. “Because of the boom, there’s an illusion that I’m going to get rich making mezcal,” he said. “I just want to keep doing what I’m doing.” ♦
Mezcal Sunrise
Searching for the ultimate artisanal distillate.
By Dana Goodyear
“Mezcal makes you cry, sing, dance, hug the neighbor you just met an hour ago.”Credit Illustration by Bjorn Lie
Bricia Lopez is the mezcal queen of Los Angeles. Five years ago, Lopez, who is thirty-one and imposingly savvy, persuaded her father to let her build a mezcal bar at Guelaguetza, the restaurant that he opened when the family moved north from Oaxaca, a center of mezcal culture, in the mid-nineties. He didn’t know if Americans would like mezcal, or if Mexicans would admit that they did. But he decided to trust Bricia, and she focussed her offerings on premium mezcals—high proof, small lots, no worm. At that point, there were only a handful of brands on the market. Since then, mezcal imports have spiked, and labels have proliferated. Lopez now carries thirty. When I visited her at the bar the other day, she was in the midst of a renovation, doubling its size.
Some of Lopez’s earliest memories of life in Mexico involve the barbecue-sauce smell of cooked agave that pervaded her father’s tourist shop, where she and her brother sat on a cement floor, racing worms and tying little packets of sal de gusano to bottles of the family mezcal. Her job, at six, was to run out to the square and draw the tourists in. She is still an expert marketer: many influential L.A. bartenders thank Lopez for giving them their first taste of quality mezcal, in the form of a small bottle, sourced from Oaxaca by her dad and sealed by her with wax that she bought at Staples. Her identity is so deeply intertwined with the spirit that people call her Goddess Mayahuel, the Aztec deity of agave, whose children are sometimes figured as four hundred drunken rabbits. She prefers to keep her references bicultural. Around her neck, she wears a gold necklace that says “Mezcalifornian,” in gangster script.
Mezcal is a distilled spirit, and can be made from some thirty varieties of agave, or maguey. It is typically produced by farmers using a laborious and antiquated method, at primitive distilleries known as palenques, and sold or shared in villages to mark births, funerals, and everything in between. Contrary to popular belief, it does not induce hallucinations. Originally, “mezcal” was a generic term, like “wine,” for a spirit produced all over Mexico. Tequila, a two-billion-dollar global business, is just a style of mezcal; developed in the state of Jalisco, it is made from a single variety, the blue agave, using a largely industrialized process, and consumed on spring break in the form of slammers. Often mixed with other alcohols and enhanced with caramel coloring, tequila can also pick up flavors from the wood in which it is aged—sometimes spent whiskey barrels bought from the United States.
Traditionally, the agaves used for mezcal are roasted in an underground pit, wild-fermented in open vats, and distilled to proof, yielding a punchy, petroly, funky spirit that is thought to be a uniquely eloquent expression of terroir. Regulations allow the proof to fall between 72 and 110—but hard-liners hold that anything lower than 90 isn’t “real” mezcal. There is scarcely a serious cocktail menu in a major American city that does not feature a mezcal drink—at least three have been named for Lopez—and more and more restaurants offer lists of obscure varietals, at twenty to thirty dollars for a two-ounce pour, as if they were wines from the Loire. Lopez’s father, like many of his compatriots, is stunned by the turn in mezcal’s fortune. In his time, producers emulated tequila and did what they could to compete with it, adding a worm for flavor and to distinguish their bottle on the shelf. Now tequila companies are looking for mezcal and emphasizing the simplicity and rusticity of their product whenever possible. “We tried to sophisticate mezcal, but it turned out that people like traditional things the most,” he told me.
The mezcal boom coincides with the popularity of farm-to-table food, the rise of the craft cocktail, and the advent of the bartender as an advocate for environmental and social justice. Lopez told me, “Mezcal hits every magic word—artisanal, organic, gluten-free, vegan. It comes from a small village, and you have to drive there to get it. It’s made by a family. It automatically became cool when knowing what you eat became cool. Tequila got to the point where it’s like Tyson chicken—that’s Cuervo. Now I want to know my chicken’s name. That’s mezcal.”
Mezcal’s ascent is both a victory for those who love it and a cause for concern. The grains for whiskey are planted and harvested each year; grapes are perennials. But most agaves—succulents, kin to asparagus—resist domestication. Espadín, one of the easiest to grow, takes up to a decade to mature, and each piña—the usable core, stripped of its spiky blades—yields only about ten bottles of mezcal. Prized wild varieties can take longer and yield less. Tobalá, a tiny, feisty plant that grows under oaks on high-altitude slopes and secretes an enzyme that breaks down granite, needs as many as fifteen years, and gives up about two bottles of mezcal per piña. Tepeztate ripens over a quarter century. The desire to consume a botanical time capsule is fraught; every precious sip both supports a traditional craft and hastens its extinction. “I truly believe mezcal will be big everywhere, because it’s delicious,” Josh Goldman, a Los Angeles bar consultant, told me. “Though there may be a subconscious thing going on—see it or eat it before it’s gone.”
“It says the cost of the flight went up because we acknowledged its existence.”
Celebrities like Bing Crosby helped make tequila famous in mid-century America, but mezcal was a spirit for the highbrow underground. Cooper was a frequent guest of Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, art collectors who were behind Gemini G.E.L., a printmaking studio that championed L.A. artists. “William Burroughs is there,” Cooper recalled. “Rauschenberg is there. Tony Berlant is there. Larry Bell is there. Everyone from the L.A. art world is there, and I got the good stuff and we’re all drinking it and we’re having a good time. And then it goes to the in-group in New York—Jasper Johns, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson.” In 1990, he said, “I had some ****-you money from a couple of large commissions” and spent six months in Oaxaca. He gave himself permission to explore different media, and came to see his buzz as a work of art. “A work of art transforms the viewer,” he said. “Mezcal gave me all these incredible, humorous thoughts—transformation.”
In 1995, Cooper began exporting mezcal to the United States under the name Del Maguey, emphasizing the agave varietals in each batch and the village of origin. (The artist Ken Price painted all the labels.) Cooper invited influential bartenders to Oaxaca and took them to the villages to meet the mezcaleros who were adhering to methods passed down by their great-great-grandfathers. He fed his guests barbacoa, and taught them to say stigibeu, a Zapotec word for “cheers.” Last year, he says, he sold fifty thousand six-bottle cases. But it isn’t like it was. “I could take the best shit to the U.S. without anybody checking it—it was pristine, naïve, pure bliss,” he told me. “I converted people one person at a time, nose to nose. I created this whole market, and until three years ago I owned the whole ****ing deal.”
It was only a matter of time before someone recognized the potential of artisanal mezcal and scaled it up. In 2013, Fausto Zapata, an entrepreneur from Los Angeles, launched a brand called El Silencio, an approachable mezcal aimed at mainstream American drinkers—in Scotch terms, a smooth, honeyed Oban rather than a peat monster like Laphroaig. “We’re the slick ones—as much a marketing company as a mezcal company,” he says. “We’re elevating into a pop-culture phenomenon something that people like seeing as niche.” Jeremy Piven is an investor; El Silencio is featured in Aeromexico’s first-class lounge.
Zapata grew up in Mexico City, drinking tequila-and-Sprite to give himself nerve when he went out to the clubs; as he grew older, he took road trips to Oaxaca, in search of something authentic, mythic, and cool, and found mezcal. His sipper is an 80-proof combination of wild and farmed agaves; his mixing mezcal, an 86-proof Espadín, comes in a bottle the matte-black color of the Batmobile. He sold ten thousand cases last year, and hopes to double that in 2016. “We want to create a global brand,” he told me. “You don’t just drink single malt in a village in Scotland, or sake in Japan.”
“Either those ducks are dead or we’re standing upside down in a lake.”
David Suro-Piñera, an artisan tequila maker who advocates for mezcal, told me that many of the distillers who would be most affected are illiterate, economically marginal, and live in communities where there is no Internet. To him, the motive behind the proposed law was clear: big companies, especially tequila makers, were threatened by the rising popularity of all things agave. They didn’t want to be blindsided the way that large beer companies were by microbrews, which now control some twelve per cent of a multibillion-dollar industry. It was of a piece, he said, with the rest of colonial history. “When the Spaniards arrived in the Americas, they prohibited the production of alcoholic beverages by the indigenous people. When are they going to let these people alone?”
One morning in Oaxaca, I went to see Hipócrates Nolasco, the president of the Consejo Regulador del Mezcal, the advisory body that administers the holograms. A chemist with a Ph.D. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Nolasco works out of a laboratory where young technicians in lab coats test samples from hundreds of palenques, verifying proof and checking for levels of methanol and other volatile compounds in a gas-chromatography machine. Music blared from a radio, and flasks of yellow and clear liquid were strewn about the benches. Along the wall was a stencilled motif of a green agave plant with a chemical flask in place of the piña. The lab, which Nolasco ran until 2013, is a private business; mezcal companies pay twelve hundred pesos to test each batch, a necessary step before the C.R.M. can approve it for sale.
Thirty-eight and baby-faced, Nolasco wears cowboy boots and golf shirts. His office, separated from the lab by glass panels, is a museum of mezcal. Hundreds of bottles—his personal collection—line the walls on mirrored shelves. In a conference room appointed with red leather chairs, Nolasco offered me a drink of javelí, his favorite varietal—“It’s afternoon in Europe,” he said, smiling. He comes from a sorghum-farming family, in a part of Oaxaca that does not produce mezcal. His appreciation stems from his training as a scientist. He pushed a button, releasing a screen from the ceiling, and showed me a presentation of side-by-side chromatographs of mezcal and other major spirits. The line for mezcal jittered along the x-axis, jumping up dramatically every inch or two—the chemical profile of mezcal can include furfural, which carries hints of bread, nuts, and caramel, and napthalene, a hydrocarbon that lends a note of tar. Vodka’s line, by comparison, was stolid and straight, featureless as snow.
He explained to me how the proposed regulations, which he helped craft, would protect the growing prestige of mezcal, as well as consumers. “We are all agave distillates,” he said, explaining that the use of the term “agave” by uncertified and possibly unscrupulous distillers encroached on the D.O. In December, he said, the C.R.M. conducted a study of the marketplace and found that nearly half the mezcals for sale were illegitimate—untested fakes, any one of which could have been contaminated with methanol. “It takes only twelve millilitres of methanol to go blind,” he said. “In the best case, when you drink a fake you will get a bad impression. You will get a bad hangover. You can have a bad party. And then you think that is mezcal. We are very jealous about what we can call real mezcal. It’s the most expensive exported beverage in Mexico right now—it costs three times as much per bottle as tequila—but one problem could be catastrophic.”
During his four years at the C.R.M., Nolasco said, he’d brought many mezcaleros into compliance. But it was hard going. “You confront a lot of factors,” he told me. “Resistance, laziness, no interest in innovation, no interest in a new challenge.” The scoundrels, he suggested, were not the producers but the middlemen who brought uncertified spirits to consumers. “They avoid all the taxes,” he said. “They hide behind the idea that they are helping a poor farmer. They sell it in bars and restaurants, and they even export it without permission. The worst are the ones who pay less here but sell the ultra-expensive bottles for two hundred dollars in the United States. It’s a very good business being outside the law.”
* chef formerly worked at Saison, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco, and the menu—which emphasized “local, artisanal, organic” food—was designed to be ephemeral. The walls were painted with murals of wild agave varietals, accompanied by their common and their scientific names. Cox, who graduated from Denison University, with a degree in politics, philosophy, and economics, is wiry and sharp-featured and has an asymmetrical haircut that flops in his face, flustering him like a yearling with an unruly forelock. For much of the past year, he has studied mezcal aggressively; after visiting dozens of palenques, he assembled a menu of obscure offerings, which he buys wholesale in plastic jugs and bottles in a back room.
Having recently discovered mezcal, Cox feels fiercely protective of its future; given the shortage of raw material, its popularity scares him. “I don’t give a shit about the common person who thinks mezcal is a smoked tequila,” he said. “It’s not a drink to buy in clubs. This is limited! It should be consumed by people who know what they’re talking about.”
Cox presented his favorite: an earnest glass bottle with an agave-fibre label. “This one’s fermented in cowhide,” he said. It was wonderfully weird and comforting, salty-sweet and leathery, like Old Spice on a beloved cheek. I turned the bottle around and read the name of the maker, “Maestro Mezcalero: Alvarado Álvarez.” Cox said that he went to the source, a tiny village called Santa María Ixcatlán, every other month to pick up an allotment of about twenty-six litres; it happened that he was going the next day. As for the pending regulations, he said, the mezcalero, whose full name was Amando Alvarado Álvarez, didn’t care at all. “He’s going to sell it whatever the **** you call it. You can call it piss water, for all he cares.”
Early the next morning, Lopez picked up Cox and me in her father’s Jeep. Cox had cash in his pocket, and a jug that he stowed in the back. We drove for three hours, through high-desert plains weird with Joshua trees and forests of oak festooned with air plants, like Christmas trees in a hotel lobby. The road dipped and rose, and we entered Ixcatlán through a colorful gate. The streets were empty, the cathedral flanked by bare cement galleries where pilgrims camp during the town’s main festival. We stopped at Alvarado’s mother’s house for lunch—tortillas made from her own corn, eaten in the kitchen while love songs played on the radio.
The palenque was at the edge of a bio-reserve, high in the mountains, twenty miles from where the tropics begin. We got out and walked down a little slope, past a pile of singed agaves to a covered structure on the side of a hill above a streambed. The air was heavy. Alvarado crouched beside a small clay pot with a bamboo pipe poking from its side which emptied into a clay jug. The space was rigged with an ingenious network of angled bamboo sluices, which, Swiss Family Robinson-style, used gravity to bring cool water to the stills. Three hides full of fermenting must bowed from tree-pole frames lashed together with rope. Cox stepped up for a closer look. “This is raw, man!” he said. “Fresh leather.”
** apiece.
Lopez asked Alvarado how he usually sold. Wholesale, he said, or through a nonprofit brand associated with the bio-reserve, which gave him young agaves that he could plant as part of a reforestation effort. That brand, supported by an ex-governor of Oaxaca, was certified, but he chose to keep the rest of his output outside the reach of the C.R.M.; the hologram was too costly. He did not like to charge too much, lest high prices fuel a gold rush on the agave. “If you want to take it with you in your stomach, it’s free,” he said.
“I’ll never change the way I’m making this, but if here in Ixcatlán I had to say ‘booze’ or ‘liquor,’ as opposed to ‘mezcal,’ people would be scared away by it.” He was contemplating giving his product a name in Ixcatec, a language that fewer than ten living people speak. “Maybe it’s wrong that I stay away from everything,” Alvarado said. “I’m trying to join the movement. I want to fight for the rights of the mezcaleros to respect the right traditions, so the C.R.M. doesn’t make laws to change the process.” He said that an official had been out to see him, and had recommended that he store his mezcal not in plastic jugs but in barrels, which would change the flavor. “Because of the boom, there’s an illusion that I’m going to get rich making mezcal,” he said. “I just want to keep doing what I’m doing.” ♦
