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 bland.
Ron’s single village marketing strategy was reminiscent of single malt Scotch. He bottled his micro-distilled mezcals in limited, numbered batches, after purchasing them in bulk from a handpicked selection of small-scale producers known as maestros mezcaleros, or palenqueros. They created their signature drinks in and for the rural Oaxacan communities where they lived, and Del Maguey presented them to customers like vintners. In a world of worms, Ron’s fresh approach to mezcal packaging was innovative. Although his products had only a miniscule share of the spirits market, especially compared with tequila, they were nonetheless winning top awards at tasting events in the U.S., establishing him as a trailblazing mezcal maverick.
He had brought one of the producers along to greet me—Faustino Garcia Vasquez, the maker of Del Maguey’s “Chichicapa” mezcal. Vasquez had a dark moustache and wore a cowboy hat, Western shirt, blue jeans, and huaraches (leather sandals). I would learn that his dress is typical of mezcal makers, who are often farmers, too. He and his family lived in a rural village called San Baltazar Chichicapam, which, Ron told me, was “on the other side of that big mountain over there,” pointing to a high, rugged ridge looming in the distance.
As we ate breakfast in the airport restaurant overlooking the runway, Faustino seemed completely absorbed by the aircraft taking off and landing outside. Then again, he may have simply felt left out of the conversation. He didn’t speak English, and even Spanish was his second tongue, after Zapoteco, a tonal Oto-Manguean language with as many as sixty local versions that sounded, to my untrained ear, like a hybrid of Portuguese and Chinese. My own Spanish at the time was minimal, and Ron spoke it in a laid-back SoCal drawl. His voice reminded me of Dennis Hopper’s. Indeed, the late actor turned out to have been one of many prominent friends and acquaintances of Ron, who was a well-established contemporary artist.
THE HIGH LIFE seemed far away as the three of us piled into the cab of Ron’s dusty pickup. Carefully manning the steering wheel, he took us from the manicured, leafy grounds of the airport to a boulevard busy with honking taxis, belching buses, and thunderous trucks battling each other like luchadores (wrestlers) in the ring.
Situated at around fifty-one hundred feet above sea level, at the nexus of three valleys, Oaxaca de Juárez is surrounded by formidable pine- and oak-covered slopes that are part of two mountain chains, the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca and the Sierra Madre del Sur. It was early August, still within the annual rainy season that typically stretches from May to September. The air was damp, and the distant peaks were cloaked in white mists.
So I wasn’t surprised to learn that some Zapotecs have called themselves Be’ena’ Za’a (The Cloud People). Around 15 percent of Mexicans identify as indigenous, and about 6 percent speak one of sixty-eight distinct languages. Oaxaca has the second-largest indigenous population in the country, after the state of Yucatán. There are sixteen different ethnic-language groups in the state, and approximately 30 percent of Oaxacans speak a language other than Spanish. The biggest indigenous groups are the Zapotec and Mixtec, who are, respectively, the third- and fourth-largest in the country, after the Nahuatl and Maya. The smallest groups in Oaxaca are the Ixcatec and Popoluca, who together number only a few hundred.
As he fought the traffic, Ron informed me that traditionally distilled mezcal is predominantly crafted by the Zapotec, with the Mixtec coming in a distant second. Although the spirit was slowly gaining respect abroad—in no small part due, he said, to his own crusading efforts to “redefine the category”—it still had an image problem to contend with at home, where it was often looked down upon by elite Mexicans as campesino (peasant) swill made by barefoot Indígenas (Indians). The Denomination of Origin (DO) for mezcal was established in 1994, and Ron launched his brand in 1995. He had been on a mission to recast the spirit on the world stage ever since.
The city’s historic center is famous for its fine colonial buildings, many of them constructed with a locally quarried green stone that has given Oaxaca de Juárez one of its most colorful nicknames—the Emerald City. But here in the less touristy part, the potholed streets were lined with a nondescript sprawl of boxy concrete buildings housing automotive supply and repair shops, an occasional strip club, and simple taquerías. Many of these structures were painted in bright oranges, greens, and blues; all were liberally dusted with traffic soot; and some had strips of bare rebar sticking straight up from their roofs, the