The Mezcal Rush: Explorations in Agave Country

THE MEZCAL RUSH

Copyright © 2017 by Granville Greene

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Cover design by Jennifer Heuer

Interior design by Megan Jones Design

eISBN 978-1-61902-895-1

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for my parents and grandparents

Mescal, Yvonne said brightly.

The air was so full of electricity it trembled.

—MALCOLM LOWRY, UNDER THE VOLCANO

PROLOGUE

EARLY ONE EVENING, Juan and Miguel, landscapers who work in my neighborhood in Santa Fe, stopped by in their pickup. They knew I was writing about the Mexican spirit mezcal , and they had a drink they wanted to share with me from their home in the state of Chihuahua. The clear liquid filled about a third of its hand-blown glass bottle, and the men watched me intently as I took a small sip. It was fiercely strong, yet rich with distinctive flavors that took me on several excursions at once. But mostly, it tasted alive.

What was it?

"It’s sotol from the mountains," Juan beamed.

During my visits to Mexico (which included spending nearly a year in the state of Oaxaca for this book), I had learned that sotol is a distillate of the Desert Spoon plant, Dasylirion wheeleri. With its slender, pointed spines, the succulent is sometimes mistaken for the agave plants that are used as the materia prima for mezcal distillation. They are related, and like agave, Desert Spoon grows on both sides of the border and has been a valuable resource for indigenous peoples for thousands of years. The strong fibers from the leaves of both plants can be extracted to weave baskets and cord, and their fleshy cores can be baked for food or cooked, mashed, and fermented for distilling spirits. Desert Spoon is named after the base of its leaf, which can be used as a utensil.

Juan and Miguel’s sotol had been crafted in and for their community, from local plants, by artisanal methods passed down through generations. Along with traditionally distilled mezcal, bacanora, raicilla, and other Mexican spirits that use agave, sotol is a labor-intensive drink that historically has been made in small batches and reserved for important events in a village. But it has long found its way across the frontier, and versions have even been fabricated in the U.S. With occasional sips enjoyed along the journey, the men’s unbranded bottle had been handed, amigo to compadre, all the way from the rugged slopes of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental, across the international boundary straddling the great Chihuahuan Desert, and up the interstate blacktop partly laid over the ancient Camino Real trade route—until the last swigs were given to me in the Sangre de Cristo foothills.

The guys wanted to hang on to their handsome vessel, so I transferred its contents to a jam jar and put it on a shelf loaded with dozens of other glass containers, every one filled with a handcrafted Mexican spirit that tells an individual story of people, plants, and place. For me, the carefully authored drinks in my small collection represent only a few great books from a vast library that I know I can never fully read, and are written in languages that I’m ill equipped to understand. I’m not a botanist, a booze pundit, an anthropologist, or any other type of expert—I’m just an amateur who wanted to learn more. But for Juan and Miguel, each time they sip their sotol it is as if they are swallowing a liquid version of home. The distillate’s unique essences reconnect them to the culture they remain spiritually a part of, yet have physically left behind. It doesn’t matter if their local sotol tastes good or bad, or if anyone else likes it. The drink is a reflection of who they are—and that is something to be proud of.

Moved by their generosity, I found myself wishing that their gesture had been my initiation into the fascinating world of Mexican spirits. But the reality was far less memorable. As with the vast majority of other U.S. consumers, my first experiences had been with industrially manufactured tequila and cheap commercially made mezcal—the type with a worm at the bottom of the bottle, the ten yards of barbed wire fence that the novelist Malcolm Lowry has his alcoholic consul hooked on in Under the Volcano.

I sampled such mass-produced agave products from the early 1980s, during my college years, until 1998, when I encountered a far more exceptional Mexican drink: a pricey bottle of Oaxacan mezcal that had been micro-distilled from Agave angustifolia, commonly known as espadín. It was handmade by a family in the remote Zapotec village of Santo Domingo Albarradas, but I found it repackaged in a gourmet food-and-wine store in Santa Fe. When I brought it home and tried it, the spirit’s delectable flavors seeped into my consciousness like an otherworldly piece of music. It tasted completely different from any mezcal I had tried before, and I became so taken by it that I wanted to learn more about what it was, who made it, and where it came from.

At the time, artisanally crafted mezcal was only just beginning to appear on the radar in the U.S., and there wasn’t much information about it. I realized that the best way for me to learn about the spirit was to head to Mexico, where, according to new studies, it has been distilled for thousands of years. My instruction began in 2000, when a magazine sent me to Oaxaca, home to the widest variety of agaves and the mezcals that are made from them. There, I was awakened to the extraordinary diversity of family-produced Mexican spirits.

Manufacturers of tequila use only one type of plant, Agave tequilana, and because they generally steam its heart in industrial machines, their product has a somewhat neutral taste. But traditional mezcals celebrate the diverse characters of numerous agave species, which are roasted in underground wood-fired ovens that infuse the drinks with their distinctive smoky notes. The nuanced flavors reflect myriad variations in landscape, soil, microclimates, airborne yeasts, and distillation techniques—not to mention the ingenuity of their makers. On that first visit to Oaxaca, and during my subsequent explorations for this book, I grew to respect the spirit as one of Mexico’s most poetic creations. Each mezcal can be an eloquent expression of the alchemist crafting it, even functioning as an unspoken language among the members of a community.

These days, the drink is on the move, finding its way to hip bars from Rome to Tokyo. Mezcal has been adopted by the Slow Food and craft-spirits camps, and helps to quench a burgeoning thirst for authenticity that has taken hold of many consumers. Yet what is almost certainly the oldest distilled beverage of the Americas remains largely unknown in relation to its hugely popular cousin, tequila, which has skyrocketed in worldwide sales over the past few decades. English-language dictionaries still even spell mezcal in an archaic form: mescal. Its relative obscurity is due not only to the unsavory image it’s been saddled with—the drink with the worm—but also, in class- and race-conscious Mexico, to its historically having been identified with the country’s marginalized indigenous populations. The diverse peoples who traditionally make mezcal have long been excluded from defining the spirit for Mexican and international markets.

As the price for convenience, we have been conditioned by agro-industry to take for granted a great deal of what we put in our bodies. We’ve lost touch with our innate ability to wonder about who picked the beans for our coffee, or cut the cane for the sugar we use to sweeten it, or milked the cows for the milk we stir in. But the individual interactions that can arise from getting to know who makes our stuff can be profoundly satisfying. And in our fast-paced age of continuous switching between globalization and deglobalization, the truths behind what we purchase are becoming increasingly relevant to the pressing issues of equality and sustainability.

As much as some consumers might prefer to become locavores, most will likely remain globavores—which raises many pertinent questions. In a speech in late 2016, former U.S. President Barack Obama said, The current path of globalization demands a course correction. In the years and decades ahead, our countries have to make sure that the benefits of an integrated global economy are more broadly shared by more people, and that the negative impacts are squarely addressed. His successor, U.S. President Donald Trump, repeatedly called for the mass deportation of illegal Mexican immigrants and the construction of an impenetrable physical wall along the 1,989-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. I decided not to use the real names of Juan and Miguel because they may be undocumented. But for readers of this book, I have a suggestion: You may know your bartender’s name, so how about finding out your mezcal maker’s? And when you learn it, tell everyone you know.

Agave salmiana

PART ONE

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

THE FIRST TIME I remember drinking mezcal was in the early 1980s in Baltimore. I was in college, and my friends and I found a cheap bottle in a run-down liquor store near the campus. The high alcohol content served our purposes, but everything else looked dubious. There was a grotesque, crinkled worm lurking at the bottom, and the spirit’s yellowy brown color reminded me of water from a rusty faucet. It tasted so awful that swilling it on a dare seemed its best possible use. I didn’t think about who made it. I only knew it was from Mexico and distilled from something called agave, which I figured was a type of cactus. And I had heard that crazy things happened when people ate the worm, although I didn’t get that far. I probably would have laughed if anyone had told me that tasting notes on body, finish, and terroir would someday be used to describe mezcal.

Many years later, I found myself living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and becoming more curious about the large country lying across the state’s southern border. Echoes of it were everywhere—from chile peppers and mission churches to agaves. The vast desert landscapes now divided between the state and Mexico were once conjoined as a viceroyalty of New Spain. But long before conquistadors came hunting for fabled cities of gold, ancient pathways already traversed the region, walked by Ancestral Puebloan, Mogollon, Hohokam, and other peoples. When I first visited Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, I was amazed to learn of its archaeoastronomical sites, and the straight, well-engineered roads that once brought turquoise, seashells, and macaw feathers to its beautiful stone-walled buildings. Until then, I hadn’t thought much about my belonging to a new culture that had cannibalized the lands of far older and perhaps more sophisticated cultures.

During the era of Spanish colonization, one extremely long indigenous trail was developed into El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, a sixteen-hundred-mile trade route extending all the way from Mexico City to San Juan Pueblo. The grueling wagon and foot journey along it, of which a particularly arduous one-hundred-mile section became known as Route of the Dead Man, brought an influx of Spanish settlers to the newly formed territory of Nuevo México. With them came Christianity, disease, guns, and alcohol. A tax record from 1873 for the town of Tequila, where sixteen distilleries were serving a population of twenty-five hundred, noted that three casks of mezcal wine were sent all the way to Santa Fe via El Paso, Texas.

One day in the mid-1990s, I climbed into my pickup and drove along several paved-over portions of the Camino Real, as I headed 285 miles south on I-25 to visit some friends in Las Cruces. The highway follows the Rio Grande as it meanders through parched and desolate expanses, bare brown mountains rolling into the distance. El Paso and its Mexican neighbor, Juárez, are only an hour further south from Las Cruces, and we thought it might be fun to spend a few hours on the other side of the border. On a warm Saturday evening at sunset, before Juárez gained its worldwide notoriety as a grisly battleground in the Mexican drug war, we walked across the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande from El Paso.

Below us, the river trickled through a wide culvert littered with trash. A sagging Mexican flag met us at the middle of the bridge, and we entered the country by passing through a squeaky turnstile. A taxi brought us to a touristy mercado several blocks away, where we sat around an outdoor table, swilling ice-cold bottles of Carta Blanca beer. There were stalls selling piñatas, serapes, and other souvenirs, and a mariachi trio serenaded us with mournful ballads while children implored us to buy Chiclets. A guy in a Pancho Villa–style bandito outfit was making his way from table to table, with a holster loaded with shot glasses strapped across his chest, a bottle of mezcal in his hand. His target? Gringos estúpidos.

It seemed like the right time to give the drink another try, but of course it wasn’t. The shot he poured me was so strong and sickly sweet that it gave my body a ghoulish shiver. Just then another man appeared with a small wooden box slung over his shoulder. It had a pair of long wires extending from it with handles attached to their ends. With a naughty grin, he instructed two of us to each grasp a handle with one hand and to use our other hand to hold the hand of our neighbor. As he slowly turned a dial on the box, electricity blasted through the wires, tingled our fingers, and briefly paralyzed our circle in a crude form of shock therapy. This, I thought, was the kind of dumb stuff you get into when drinking mezcal. I was a gringo estúpido.

My head spinning, I was wondering if it would be smart to switch to tequila when we landed in a legendary barroom called the Kentucky Club. One of several establishments in Mexico that claimed to be the birthplace of the margarita, it was on Avenida Juárez, the lively main drag by the bridge. A nondescript facade masked a manly, wood-detailed interior that had been beckoning Americans across the border since Prohibition. The handsomely burnished bar was said to have been carved in France, and Marilyn Monroe had allegedly sidled up to it. The devil-may-care vibe inspired one of the friends I was with to later propose to his girlfriend there, and perhaps inspired her to say yes.

We were served a round of the famous house margaritas by a poker-faced bartender wearing a crisp white shirt and a black tie. As A Whiter Shade of Pale played on the jukebox, we toasted a dusty stuffed raptor frozen in action, its wings spread for flight. Then we drank more. Although I liked to think I was as macho as the steely-eyed matadors staring down at us from faded pictures on the bar’s nicotine-stained walls, I could barely handle my hangover. I would eventually learn that tequila is actually one of many types of mezcal, but I felt so lousy after our Juárez adventure that I thought it might be better to keep clear of any agave distillate in the future.

SINCE I HAD decided that mezcal could only be cheap rocket fuel, I was surprised when, in the late 1990s, I came across a radically different variation at the Standard Market, a gourmet-food store in Santa Fe. Every bottle of mezcal I had previously seen had an embalmed-looking worm in it. But this brand was elegantly packaged in cylindrical containers that were beautifully woven from palm fiber. I picked up one circled by green stripes and tiny triangles suggesting mountains. A wine bottle inside was labeled with an artful graphic, by the late artist Ken Price, of a yellow pot beside a pink house on a green village lane, below a pair of peaks with dark birds soaring overhead. It was from Santo Domingo Albarradas, a community in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, which a smaller label instructed me to pronounce wa-ha-ka.

The spirit cost a bracing $45, but I felt strangely compelled, much like Alice when she discovers the tabletop vial with the DRINK ME sign tied to its neck. The clincher, however, was when I found a bottle mispriced for $15. I brought it home and unsealed it by pulling away a thread encased in golden beeswax around the cork—a presentation I had never seen before, and that I imagined must be traditionally Oaxacan. Noting that there was no worm in the bottle, I poured some into a shot glass and held it to the light. Unlike the sickly-yellow mezcals I had previously encountered, it was clear—and smelled both sweet and smoky. Following a directive on the bottle to sip, not shoot, I took a careful taste.

The mezcal was powerful, and its smoke-imbued accents reminded me of the peaty flavors of single malt Scotch whisky. At the time, I was unaware that it tasted that way because the agave hearts had been baked in a firewood-heated pit oven called an horno. But as I sipped, the initial smokiness receded and more subtle tastes emerged: something lemon-limey, and possibly peppery—and was that a hint of vanilla bean? As the alcohol warmed my throat and chest, I read more of the label. Like a sommelier recommending a sauvignon blanc, it told me that the mezcal had a long, dry, smooth finish.

Given my limited knowledge of mezcal at the time, it seemed a stretch to apply an oenophilic vocabulary to that drink with the worm. Still, even with my unrefined experience sampling fine wines, spirits, and cultivated cuisine in general, I could already tell that this was quite something. Aside from its complex and delicious tastes, it offered a clean, powerful high that seemed to lift me right out of myself. If the drink had a soundtrack, it might have been The Beatles’ instrumental Flying, from Magical Mystery Tour. But that night, as I enjoyed my first sips of artisanal mezcal before a crackling fire, it seemed I had tumbled after Alice down her rabbit hole.

The Wonderland to which I imagined myself transported, however, was the picturesque Indian village where the veteran goldminer Howard suddenly finds himself in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I could almost hear the hearty calls of roosters and burros, and the vigorous trumpet bursts of mariachis. My stunted fantasies of authentic Mexican life were perhaps a result of my sheltered childhood in 1960s Baltimore, where salsa was almost unknown as a condiment, and only vaguely as an exotic dance. At that time, Mexico existed for me in the pages of well-thumbed National Geographics, and the records my father played of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. A Mexican was Mel Blanc crooning the Frito Bandito jingle.

Wouldn’t it be great, I thought as I sipped more mezcal, to actually visit Santo Domingo Albarradas and meet the people who distilled this awesome stuff? Not long after that, the free-spirited editors of Mountainfreak, a neo-hippie magazine based in Telluride, Colorado, sent me on assignment to Oaxaca to do just that. By the time it occurred to me that they could quite possibly have confused mezcal with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline, I was already on a flight headed to southern Mexico.

WHEN I LANDED in Oaxaca de Juárez, the capital of the state of Oaxaca, in the summer of 2000, Ron Cooper, the American importer of that first eye-opening mezcal from Santo Domingo Albarradas I had tried, greeted me at the provincial airport. He was middle-aged and wore his dark hair in a distinctive topknot. His fledgling company, Del Maguey (which means Of the Agave), exported five Oaxacan distillates to the U.S. Each was from a different village, and he had come up with the term single village mezcal. In return for what meager publicity my obscure Mountainfreak story might generate for his business, he had offered to show me around, put me up, and introduce me to the world of artisanally crafted agave spirits.

Many of us know mezcal as tequila, which is a type of mezcal that was given the name of the town in Jalisco where it’s been distilled since the sixteenth century. These days, most tequilas are manufactured by transnational corporations. Although there are plenty of industrially fabricated versions of mezcal, as well, the spirit is traditionally handcrafted in small quantities from the pineapple-esque piñas (or hearts) of many different types of agave in multiple regions of Mexico. These small-batch mezcals are known for diverse and intricate flavors, but tequila makers use only one type of plant, A. tequilana, and because large-scale distilleries mechanically steam its heart instead of baking it in smoky underground ovens, their products taste relatively