Slow Fire
Mezcal went from regional spirit with a bad reputation to one of the fastest-growing categories in global drinks. The agave it is made from takes eight years to mature, and twenty-five for the wild varieties — which is the entire problem, written in a plant that flowers once and dies.
The palenque sits at the end of a dirt track outside Santiago Matatlán, an hour southeast of Oaxaca city, and the first thing you notice is the smell — smoke and cooked sugar and something mineral underneath, the odour of a process that has not changed in any meaningful way for two hundred years. In a stone-lined pit in the ground, several tonnes of agave hearts are buried under volcanic rock, agave fibre and earth, roasting slowly over wood embers for three or four days. That pit is the reason mezcal tastes of smoke, and the reason the industry now finds itself with a problem it did not have in 2005.
Twenty years ago mezcal was a regional spirit with a bad international reputation, mostly derived from the worm-in-the-bottle novelty exports of the 1970s. Today it is one of the fastest-growing categories in global spirits, and Oaxaca — which produces the overwhelming majority of it — is living through the consequences of that success in a way that has very little to do with the romance printed on the labels.
What is actually in the bottle
Mezcal is any distilled spirit made from agave, which makes tequila legally a subcategory of it — tequila being mezcal made from blue weber agave in a defined region around Jalisco. The denomination of origin for mezcal covers a set of Mexican states, with Oaxaca the historic and volumetric centre.
The categories on the label are worth learning, because they are the only reliable guide to what you are buying. Mezcal ancestral is made by the strictest traditional method: agave cooked in an earthen pit, crushed by hand or with a stone tahona wheel turned by an animal, fermented in wood or stone or hide, and distilled in clay pots. Mezcal artesanal allows a copper still and mechanical crushing but keeps the pit roast. Plain mezcal — the largest category by volume — permits industrial autoclaves, diffusers, column stills and a set of processes that produce a clean, consistent, essentially different drink.
The agave variety matters as much as the method. Espadín, the domesticated workhorse, matures in six to eight years and accounts for most production. Tobalá grows wild among the rocks, is small, and takes over a decade. Tepeztate can take twenty-five years to reach maturity. Madrecuixe, arroqueño, jabalí — each is a distinct species with a distinct flavour, and each is priced by the time it took to grow.
The mathematics of a decade
Here is the structural problem. An agave plant is not a crop that responds to a price signal in a season. It is a fifteen-year investment for the wild varieties and eight for the domesticated one, it dies when it is harvested, and it flowers exactly once. When demand rose sharply and continuously through the 2010s, every producer faced the same equation: sell the mature plants you have, and you have nothing for a decade; keep them, and you miss the boom.
What happened, predictably, was harvest ahead of maturity. Espadín cut at five years instead of eight gives less sugar and thinner spirit, and requires more plants per litre, which accelerates the drawdown. Wild varieties — tobalá, tepeztate — were harvested from hillsides where nobody had ever planted anything, by collectors paid by weight, at a rate that no wild population can sustain.
You cannot scale a plant that takes twenty-five years to be ready. You can only borrow against the next generation’s hillside.
The second-order effects are ecological. Agaves are bat-pollinated; the long-nosed bats that follow the flowering north through Mexico depend on plants being allowed to flower, and a harvested agave never does. Monoculture espadín planting in place of mixed hillside has narrowed the genetic base. Cultivation has expanded onto slopes that were previously left in scrub, with the erosion outcomes you would expect on steep, dry, thin soil.
There are serious responses under way — producers leaving a proportion of plants to flower, seed banks for wild varieties, cooperative nurseries, and a growing willingness among high-end brands to publish the species, the village, the palenquero’s name and the year of the batch. Whether any of it moves fast enough is the open question of the industry.
Inside the palenque
The process is worth following in order, because every stage puts something into the glass that industrial production takes out.
The agave is harvested by a jimador, who cuts away the leaves with a coa — a long-handled blade — to leave the piña, the heart, which looks like an enormous pale pineapple and can weigh anything from thirty kilos to well over a hundred depending on species. Cutting it well is a skilled job; leaving too much leaf base puts bitterness into the spirit.
The piñas go into the horno, the conical stone-lined pit. Wood burns down to embers under a layer of volcanic rock, the agave is stacked on top, covered with fibre and earth, and left to roast for three to five days. This is where the smoke comes from, and it is also where the plant’s indigestible fructans are converted into fermentable sugar. An industrial autoclave does the same chemistry with steam in a few hours and no smoke at all — which is why a mass-market mezcal can taste closer to a light tequila than to anything from a pit.
Crushing follows: by hand with wooden mallets in the most traditional palenques, or under a tahona, a stone wheel a metre and a half across, turned in a circular trough by a horse or mule walking a rut it has walked for years. Fermentation happens in open wooden vats — sometimes pine, sometimes rawhide or stone — with wild yeast from the air and the building, which is why two palenques a kilometre apart produce measurably different spirit from identical agave.
Then distillation, twice, in copper alembics or in clay pots for the ancestral category. The palenquero judges the cuts — heads, heart, tails — by feel, by smell, and by the perlas, the ring of bubbles that forms when the spirit is poured from a height into a jícara. Bubbles that hold their shape and disperse slowly indicate the strength is right. It is a test that predates hydrometers and is still what most makers actually use.
None of this is performance for visitors. It is how the majority of Oaxacan mezcal is genuinely made, by roughly the same method, in villages that have no particular interest in whether anyone watches.
Who gets paid
The classic extractive pattern applies here with almost diagrammatic clarity. A bottle of single-village artisanal mezcal sells in a bar in Berlin or Brooklyn for a sum that would represent a substantial share of a Oaxacan palenquero’s monthly income. The distance between those two numbers is filled by brand owners, importers, distributors and duty.
The change worth watching is that some of the value has begun to move. A cohort of producer-owned brands now exports directly. Certification has grown teeth, and the regulatory council’s traceability requirements — however contested their administration — mean that a bottle can carry the village and the maker rather than a marketing invention. Several villages have registered collective marks.
For the visitor, the practical translation is simple. Buying at the palenque puts money directly in the maker’s hands. Buying a bottle labelled with a species, a village and a named palenquero — rather than a fictional hacienda and a colour scheme — is a decent proxy for a supply chain someone has bothered to be honest about.
Reading a label without being lied to
The mezcal shelf is now one of the most confusing in any bar, and most of the confusion is deliberate. A few things on the label are regulated and mean something; most of the rest is design.
The category — ancestral, artesanal, or plain mezcal — is defined by production method and is the single most informative word on the bottle. If it is absent, assume industrial.
The agave species should be named. Espadín is the honest workhorse and there is nothing wrong with it; a bottle that says only agave is telling you the producer either does not know or would rather not say. Ensamble means several species distilled together, which is a legitimate tradition rather than a blend of leftovers.
The state and ideally the village should appear. Oaxaca is a big place; Santiago Matatlán, San Luis del Río and Santa Catarina Minas produce recognisably different spirit, and the last of those is the clay-pot heartland.
Age statements deserve suspicion. Reposado and añejo mezcal — rested in wood — exist, and some are excellent, but barrel ageing does to mezcal roughly what it does to gin: it covers the thing you bought it for. The overwhelming majority of serious mezcal is joven, unaged, and clear.
Then there is pechuga, which sounds like a marketing invention and is not: a third distillation run with fruit, nuts, spices and a raw chicken or turkey breast suspended in the vapour path, traditionally made for weddings and saints’ days. The protein strips harshness and adds a texture that is genuinely difficult to describe. It is expensive because it consumes a batch to make a fraction of one.
Finally: the worm. There is no worm in mezcal as a tradition. The gusano is a moth larva that infests agave, and putting one in the bottle was a mid-twentieth-century marketing decision aimed at export markets. Its presence in a bottle today is a reliable signal that the bottle was made for people who do not know what they are buying.
The valleys underneath
Mezcal is the export, but the society it comes from is older and more interesting than the drink. Oaxaca is the most ethnically diverse state in Mexico — sixteen recognised Indigenous peoples, with Zapotec and Mixtec the largest, and a linguistic map so fragmented that villages an hour apart can speak varieties of the same language that are not mutually intelligible.
Much of the state is governed under usos y costumbres, a legal recognition of traditional community governance: officials chosen in assembly rather than by party ballot, and unpaid civic service — the cargo system — as an obligation of membership. Hundreds of Oaxacan municipalities operate this way, which makes the state a working exception to how the rest of Mexico is administered.
The land tenure that goes with it matters for anyone walking in the sierra. Most of the forest and hillside is communal, held by the community rather than by individuals, and the community decides who may cut, plant, graze or guide on it. That is why the Pueblos Mancomunados — eight villages north of the city that jointly run a tourism network with their own trails, cabins and guides — exist in the form they do, and why hiring a local guide there is a rule rather than an upsell.
It also underlies the two great crafts of the valleys. The weaving of Teotitlán del Valle uses cochineal, indigo and wild marigold on wool, on treadle looms introduced in the sixteenth century over a design tradition considerably older. The alebrijes of San Martín Tilcajete and Arrazola — carved copal figures painted in dense patterns — are usually described as ancient and are in fact a twentieth-century invention that became a genuine tradition inside two generations, which is a more interesting story than the invented antiquity.
How to drink it, and where
Mezcal is not a shot. In Oaxaca it is sipped from a jícara — a small gourd bowl — or a shallow copita, at length, with a slice of orange and sal de gusano if you like it, and there is no hurry attached. The convention when a glass is poured is a murmured stigibeu in Zapotec or simply salud; either way it is a toast, not a starting gun.
Oaxaca city has an unreasonable concentration of mezcalerías, from the well-known — In Situ, Mezcaloteca, and the small bars along Calle Reforma — to unmarked rooms where the selection is a shelf of unlabelled glass bottles and a man who knows exactly which village each came from. The route out to Matatlán and Tlacolula strings together dozens of working palenques, most of which will show a visitor the pit, the tahona and the still without ceremony, and expect nothing beyond a purchase.
Go on a Sunday if you can, when the Tlacolula market runs — the largest and oldest of the valley’s rotating markets, Zapotec-speaking, chaotic, and a reminder that the mezcal economy sits on top of an agricultural society that was here long before anyone in London had heard of tepeztate.
The bottle you carry home was in the ground for a decade. It is worth the twenty minutes it takes to drink properly.
Diego is a bogotano journalist who has covered his city’s reinvention for fifteen years — transit, food, altitude and all. He rides Ciclovía every Sunday and will defend ajiaco against all comers.