Mezcal’s Dance with Extinction
Wild agave gives the Mexican liquor its prized, hyper-local flavors. Can Oaxacan makers cultivate their way out of a fast-developing supply crisis?
What was for centuries an unknown drink — the everyday firewater of poor Mexican farmers — is suddenly a premium global spirit with the cachet of whiskey. Mezcal enthusiasts from London to New York to Hong Kong are lapping it up, enchanted by its complex flavors and the quaint idea of its traditional, rural, small-scale production.
Yet that surging demand is driving a potentially suicidal production boom. To continue making mezcal, producers depend on a steady supply of wood, water, and agave. All three ingredients are critical, and all three are at risk if production keeps rocketing upward. But the third ingredient, agave, is foremost in the minds of mezcaleros right now.
Whereas tequila, to be legally called tequila, must be made mainly from the blue Tequilana Weber agave, mezcal can be made from a cornucopia of varieties, each imparting its own characteristic flavor. By far the most common is a tart agave called espadín, a workhorse of a plant that’s easily cultivated and takes a relatively short eight years to reach maturity.
Yet demand is rising for mezcals made from the wild agaves that have always grown in the shrubby hills and pine-forested mountains of Oaxaca. There is the comparatively sweeter tobalá, the more fiery cuishe, plus tepextate, barril, arroqueño, and countless more. Nature makes a mighty investment in these plants, which take twelve, fifteen, or in some cases thirty years to grow.
The dilemma raises perhaps the ultimate question about anything that’s truly artisanal: When the world suddenly wants an abundance of authentic, homespun goods, can their authenticity survive?
Producers around the Mexican state of Oaxaca are fretting about the rapid disappearance of wild agaves from the Oaxacan mountains — and the rising price of those that remain. The cause is not only the drinking public’s growing taste for the diverse flavors that wild agave lends to mezcal, it is also tequila. A couple of years ago, when the vast blue agave fields of Jalisco were stricken with blight, tequileros came south and bought up tons of agave at attractive prices. This encouraged agave sellers to cut plants with abandon. “Jalisco took it all and left very little for Oaxaca,” says Abel Lopez, whose family makes mezcal under the Montelobos label.
The extent of the scarcity is impossible to know. There are no formal studies of wild agave populations, and no Mexican state or federal government program to protect the plants. There are only stories: mezcaleros who once cut their own tobalá or cuishe agave near their villages who now have to drive higher into the mountains, and buy the plants from others. “Before, I would take my horse up in the mountains and I’d see agaves all around,” one young mezcalero from Matatlán told me. “Not now. You can count the ones that remain.”
The response from the makers of Montelobos to the sustainability threat is pretty straightforward: they’re growing their own agaves. Their current stock is enough to sustain their 1,800 liters a month, but markets are opening up for much more. The brand’s black-labeled bottles, already available in the U.S., are starting to arrive in Australia, France, England, and Italy, with potential expansion into Canada, Panama, Colombia, and Holland coming soon. The partners are now trying to contract with more growers — all local, so as to maintain their product’s terroir. And all must be willing to go organic, since Montelobos is certified.
Like the rows of agaves that radiate out from the Lopezes’ palenque, or distillery, these new growers’ plants will all be of a single variety: espadín, the agave workhorse. Despite its hardiness, the prospect of cultivating just one agave of course raises red flags. Isn’t that the same practice that has plagued the tequileros? Hopefully, not in this case.
The mistake the tequileros made was to let their desire for efficiency blind them to agave’s need for genetic diversity. To maximize production, they chose agaves with the fastest yields and densest sugars, and then planted the buds, or hijuelos, that sprout from their sides. Unfortunately, agave buds are genetic clones of their mothers; the practice therefore created agave plantations across Jalisco with the very same weaknesses to weather and disease. So when the Montelobos farmers plant espadín, they keep the buds in the same fields where they were born, allowing different fields to maintain distinct genetic identities. The farmers also let a handful of plants go to seed, because pollinated seeds are genetically distinct from the mother. The intended result: a future of hardy agave.
A t Montelobos, Saldaña and the Lopez family are determined to demonstrate how authentic mezcal can thrive. After our arrival, Don Abel (the patriarch of the Lopez family) begins by showing me his oven, a wide, earthen pit deeper than a man is tall, just outside the palenque door. Wafting up from the pit is a sweet, caramelized aroma. He explains that they heat rocks over a wood fire at the bottom, insulate them with a bed of moist agave fiber, and then place chunks of chopped-up agave on top. They toss in a few guajillo chiles, seal the whole thing with a mat of palm leaves and a mound of earth, and let it cook for about three days. The agave is ready when a leaf extracted from the oven is perfectly browned, not burned.
To show me what this process can create, Cuauhtémoc cuts me a piece of cooked agave from a pile near the oven, and I bite into it. It’s dense and fibrous, like sugar cane, and a delicious, honey-sweet liquid runs out. If this were sold as a dessert, I’d buy it.
Despite achievements like these, sustainably farmed espadín could never solve the plant problem for the entire industry, because mezcal’s very nature is multiplicity. And Iván Saldaña, a businessman and biochemist who partners with the Lopez family to produce Montelobos, readily admits that. “Cultivation is the most responsible way of making a product like mezcal available to a wide variety of people,” he says. “On the other hand, I also don’t believe that the diversity of mezcal should be eliminated by avoiding wild mezcal. So it’s a big paradox.”
If nothing changes, insiders predict, wild agaves will become so rare and expensive that only the big mass producers of the mezcal world will be able to afford them. “If we succeed at striking a balance, then we’ll secure our supplies for the rest of our lives,” says Real Minero’s Graciela Angeles, whose family does not own enough land to grow much of their own agave. “If we fail, then our success will come and go in the blink of an eye, because these plants take many years to grow.”
For more about the hyper-local process of making mezcal and the challenges faced by its makers, read the complete story in the latest issue of Craftsmanship, the online quarterly magazine.
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Originally published September 17, 2015. ©2015 Grace Rubenstein, all rights reserved. Under exclusive license to Craftsmanship, LLC. Unauthorized copying or republication of this article is prohibited by law.
