By Ines Keane
A bottle of mezcal carries a surprising amount of information, if you know where to look. It also leaves some important things out.
Start with what the word legally means. Wikipedia says mezcal received international appellation-of-origin recognition in 1994, and that the geographical indication originally covered six states: Oaxaca, Guerrero, Durango, San Luis Potosí, Puebla and Zacatecas. Mezcalistas, a publication devoted to the spirit, lists the states a little differently in its explainer on the current standard, naming Oaxaca, Guerrero, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas and Durango, plus portions of Guanajuato, Tamaulipas, Michoacán and Puebla. We are not going to settle that. The lists may reflect different dates. If it matters to you, check the current text of the rules.
The rulebook
Mezcalistas says the norm is NOM-070-SCFI-2016. It says the norm defines what mezcal is legally, describes production processes and dictates the information brands must put on bottles. It says the norm passed into law in 2017 after replacing an earlier, widely criticized version. That is worth knowing because older articles may describe rules that no longer apply.
Three words that matter
Both Wikipedia and Mezcalistas describe three categories. Plain mezcal, they say, permits industrial equipment such as autoclaves and column stills. Artisanal mezcal, Wikipedia says, uses pit-cooked agave and traditional stills, typically distilled twice. Ancestral mezcal, Wikipedia says, must be distilled only in Filipino-type stills made of clay or wood. Mezcalistas gives a similar picture for ancestral production: pit baking, hand crushing with mallets, stone fermentation and wood-fired clay stills.
The differences are in the details, and we do not want to overstate them. We are reporting that the three category names exist, that they separate industrial from traditional methods, and that you should look for the category on the bottle rather than guess.
How it is made
Wikipedia describes the usual steps: harvest the hearts of the plants, cook them for about three days, often in pit ovens, crush them with a stone wheel, ferment in vats and distill in clay or copper vessels. It says traditional methods use Filipino-type stills and that modern production uses alembic stills. A lot of the character of a bottle comes from these choices. It also comes from the plant itself.
The plant
Wikipedia says more than 30 agave varieties qualify for mezcal, and that the most common is espadín, the predominant agave in Oaxaca. It names others, including arroqueño, cirial, barril, mexicano, cincoañero and the prized wild tobalá. InsideHook, citing the Consejo Regulador del Mezcal, reports that about 74 percent of all mezcal uses espadín, even though more than 200 agave species grow in Mexico. It gives reasons: higher sugar content, faster maturity, adaptability to altitude and climate, and a government initiative in Oaxaca that encouraged planting. It says espadín takes roughly eight years to mature, compared with 13 to 15 for cenizo and 25 for tepeztate.
That gives you a practical question to ask. If a label names the agave, it tells you something about time and about biodiversity. A bottle of one of the slower plants represents more years in the ground. We are not telling you which to buy, and we are not suggesting that one species is better. We are saying the species is information, and a label that leaves it out leaves out a good deal.
How much, and where
Wikipedia says Oaxaca produces 90 percent of Mexico’s mezcal, with 570 of 625 production facilities located there. It says Mexican production exceeded six million liters a year, reaching 7.1 million liters in 2019. These are figures from an encyclopedia entry, not from the regulator, and we have not found a current number.
Aging words
Mezcalistas lists six aging or finishing classifications: blanco or joven, reposado, añejo, madurado en vidrio (glass-rested), abocado con (infused) and destilado con (distilled with specific ingredients). A word like reposado tells you the spirit rested. It does not, by itself, tell you for how long or in what.
The worm
Wikipedia says the so-called worm, the gusano de maguey, is moth larvae of the species Comadia redtenbacheri, that it was added in the 1940s or 1950s and that its presence is debated: marketing, proof of quality or flavor. We have no source on whether any bottle you see still includes one, and we have no view on whether it should.
A short reading list for the label
Here is what we would look for. The category word. The agave species. The state or region. The aging word, if any. A producer or bottler name that you can look up. A NOM number, with the caveat that the Difford’s Guide entry on tequila, which uses a similar system, says the number shows who bottled a product and not necessarily where it was made. We have not found a source that says the same for mezcal, so treat that as a question to ask rather than an answer.
What is missing
A label will not tell you whether the agave was cultivated or wild, unless the maker says so. It will not tell you how the people working on the farm were paid. It will not tell you whether the clay stills, if there are any, were made nearby. We have not profiled any producer and will not name one we cannot source.
If you travel for this, ask the person pouring where the agave grew and how many years it stood in the field. Ask what category the bottle is. Then ask to see the label. It is the cheapest piece of documentation in the bottle.
Roam first. Shop later.
Makers in the mezcal regions can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/