Mezcal Silvestre: Is Mexico's Wild Mountain Spirit A Model Sustainable Industry?

forbes.com
4/28/2014 @ 10:26AM

Smoky, unique, and anachronistically artisan, Mezcal is rapidly becoming a go-to spirit for connoisseurs interested in connecting with Mexico’s rustic roots. Although mezcal is typically made from the same espadin agave that is used to produce tequila, mezcaleros (mezcal producers) also use a wide selection of other wild and domesticated varieties of agave. In particular, the tobala agave has found favor with consumers at high-end establishments in Mexico City and even farther abroad. As demand for the spirit grows, however, some local producers in the hills of Oaxaca on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast are starting to worry that the supply of wild tobala agave may soon be exhausted. While the corn, wheat, grapes and potatoes used to produce wine, grappa, pisco, vodka, and whisky and bourbon take a single season to grow, the agave plants used to produce mezcal can take up to two decades to mature. Standing in one of the fields that produces agave for his distillery, Jorge Rodriguez-Cano, a 25-year-old co-owner of the Amores Mezcal brand, peered out a long row of five-foot-tall dark green agave plants. Wispy clouds rolled over the jagged peaks around the valley and the hot summer sun beat down on the green agave plants, which look like gargantuan aloe vera plants, but with tougher leaves and sharp spines. “These are about ten years old,” Rodriguez-Cano explained. A few yards away Cristobal Martinez, a 53-year old farmhand chopped at an agave plant with a long, sharp machete, hacking off the leaves and leaving behind the plants one-foot-tall core, which is called a piña because it looks like a giant pineapple. “Don’t touch the piña, it’s really corrosive,” Rodriguez-Cano warned. “Once I picked up a piece of raw agave and licked it to taste the flavor. I had to spit it out and I couldn’t taste right for six months. The juice is really caustic,” he added. Martinez hacked off the leaves of another plant, one of several dozen he would harvest over the course of the morning. His hands were calloused and scarred after years of working with the agave plants. “I always use long sleeves when I work,” he explained.

 

Jorge Rodriguez-Cano (right) stands in front of a ten-year-old agave espadin plant at his farm in Oaxaca, 

Mexico. Photo by N. Parish Flannery @LatAmLENS 

 

 

Later in the afternoon, inside the distillery that produces his Mezcal Amores brand, Rodriguez-Cano surveyed the operation, watching a worker guide a horse-pulled, stone, grinding wheel over clumps of roasted, gooey agave. Using similar techniques as a New England clambake or New Zealand hāngi-style seaside barbecue, mezcal producers use a wood-fire pit and stones to create a rustic sort of oven. They place the raw agave on a pile of scalding rocks and smoldering charcoal and then cover the fire pit with leaves and dirt. As is the case with Argentine style coal-roasted onions, during the cooking process the agave goes through a chemical change, caramelizing and transforming into a molten, fibrous pulp that oozes with sweet nectar. Rodriguez-Cano picked up a chunk of roasted agave and sliced off a bite-sized piece. It was sweet and rich, similar in flavor to a candied pumpkin. At small, family-owned distilleries throughout Oaxaca, the cooked agave is fermented in giant open-topped wooden barrels and then distilled in wood-fire copper stills, a process that hasn’t changed since the Spanish introduced it during the colonial era. Rodriguez-Cano looked over a massive pile of raw agave, ready to be fed into the ovens, part of an operation that produces thousands of bottles of clear, smoky mezcal every year. “We also plant our own agave,” Rodriguez-Cano explained. “The idea is reforestation. We want to give back to the community too,” he added.

Higher up in the steep peaks outside of Oaxaca City, a colonial enclave known for its richly preserved architecture and utterly fantastic cuisine, Rodriguez-Cano strained his neck and pointed up towards the hilltop. “That’s a tobala,” he explained gesturing towards a squat plant with wide leaves. Tobala is the wild cousin of the domesticated espadin agave that Mezcal Amores and most other producers use. More complex in flavor and much harder to find, bottles of tobala mezcal can sell for hundreds of pesos in boutique stores in Oaxaca and Mexico City. At a small distillery high up in the mountains, Santos Martinez Cruz, a second-generation mezcalero explained that he and his family produce tobala mezcal. “You have to find them in the hills,” he said. “Each batch takes about 200 piñas,” he added. As iridescent mezcal dripped slowly from his still and the agave pulp steamed in the five foot tall wooden fermentation barrels, Martinez Cruz poured out a glass of tobala mezcal for his visitors to sample. It was dry, smoky, and earthy. As Martinez Cruz explained his family’s history producing mezcal, Beto Adame, a photographer visiting Oaxaca from Mexico City climbed up the hillside and snapped a photo of a small tobala plant. “It’s rugged, bulky… wider than the espadin,” he said.

While espandin agave can be cultivated and produced sustainably, tobala mezcal is more complicated. It is perhaps the most traditional variety of mezcal and the spirit that provides consumers with the most direct connection to the rustic traditions of Oaxaca’s high sierra. Mezcaleros hike up through the steep hills search out and harvesting the wild plant, bring back dozens of piñas to their distilleries. Collectively, each batch of piñas represents an entire epoch of time in the hillside. To put it in perspective, to grow 200 tobala plants to maturation one after another would take 4,000 years. With such a massive gap between the yearly harvest schedule and the decades necessary for the plants to grow, wild agave may be threatened by the recent boom in the mezcal industry. “Tobala is special, but cutting it down to make mezcal is kind of like wearing a panda-fur coat,” Rodriguez-Cano explained.

Although the agave plants feature corrosive juices and razor sharp spines that often break off inside the wound of any unlucky interloper unfortunate enough to step on one, their natural defenses are not likely to provide sufficient protection from mezcaleros keen on profiting from growing interest in tobala mezcal.

While the mezcal boom will provide a much-needed economic stimulus to many families and communities, the industry needs to engage in long-term planning to protect its own future.

“We have to think about sustainability,” Rodriguez-Cano explained.