Читать книгу The Mezcal Rush - Granville Greene - Страница 10
ОглавлениеTHE FIRST TIME I remember drinking mezcal was in the early 1980s in Baltimore. I was in college, and my friends and I found a cheap bottle in a run-down liquor store near the campus. The high alcohol content served our purposes, but everything else looked dubious. There was a grotesque, crinkled worm lurking at the bottom, and the spirit’s yellowy brown color reminded me of water from a rusty faucet. It tasted so awful that swilling it on a dare seemed its best possible use. I didn’t think about who made it. I only knew it was from Mexico and distilled from something called agave, which I figured was a type of cactus. And I had heard that crazy things happened when people ate the worm, although I didn’t get that far. I probably would have laughed if anyone had told me that tasting notes on body, finish, and terroir would someday be used to describe mezcal.
Many years later, I found myself living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and becoming more curious about the large country lying across the state’s southern border. Echoes of it were everywhere—from chile peppers and mission churches to agaves. The vast desert landscapes now divided between the state and Mexico were once conjoined as a viceroyalty of New Spain. But long before conquistadors came hunting for fabled cities of gold, ancient pathways already traversed the region, walked by Ancestral Puebloan, Mogollon, Hohokam, and other peoples. When I first visited Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, I was amazed to learn of its archaeoastronomical sites, and the straight, well-engineered roads that once brought turquoise, seashells, and macaw feathers to its beautiful stone-walled buildings. Until then, I hadn’t thought much about my belonging to a new culture that had cannibalized the lands of far older and perhaps more sophisticated cultures.
During the era of Spanish colonization, one extremely long indigenous trail was developed into El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, a sixteen-hundred-mile trade route extending all the way from Mexico City to San Juan Pueblo. The grueling wagon and foot journey along it, of which a particularly arduous one-hundred-mile section became known as Route of the Dead Man, brought an influx of Spanish settlers to the newly formed territory of Nuevo México. With them came Christianity, disease, guns, and alcohol. A tax record from 1873 for the town of Tequila, where sixteen distilleries were serving a population of twenty-five hundred, noted that three casks of “mezcal wine” were sent all the way to Santa Fe via El Paso, Texas.
One day in the mid-1990s, I climbed into my pickup and drove along several paved-over portions of the Camino Real, as I headed 285 miles south on I-25 to visit some friends in Las Cruces. The highway follows the Rio Grande as it meanders through parched and desolate expanses, bare brown mountains rolling into the distance. El Paso and its Mexican neighbor, Juárez, are only an hour further south from Las Cruces, and we thought it might be fun to spend a few hours on the other side of the border. On a warm Saturday evening at sunset, before Juárez gained its worldwide notoriety as a grisly battleground in the Mexican drug war, we walked across the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande from El Paso.
Below us, the river trickled through a wide culvert littered with trash. A sagging Mexican flag met us at the middle of the bridge, and we entered the country by passing through a squeaky turnstile. A taxi brought us to a touristy mercado several blocks away, where we sat around an outdoor table, swilling ice-cold bottles of Carta Blanca beer. There were stalls selling piñatas, serapes, and other souvenirs, and a mariachi trio serenaded us with mournful ballads while children implored us to buy Chiclets. A guy in a Pancho Villa–style bandito outfit was making his way from table to table, with a holster loaded with shot glasses strapped across his chest, a bottle of mezcal in his hand. His target? Gringos estúpidos.
It seemed like the right time to give the drink another try, but of course it wasn’t. The shot he poured me was so strong and sickly sweet that it gave my body a ghoulish shiver. Just then another man appeared with a small wooden box slung over his shoulder. It had a pair of long wires extending from it with handles attached to their ends. With a naughty grin, he instructed two of us to each grasp a handle with one hand and to use our other hand to hold the hand of our neighbor. As he slowly turned a dial on the box, electricity blasted through the wires, tingled our fingers, and briefly paralyzed our circle in a crude form of shock therapy. This, I thought, was the kind of dumb stuff you get into when drinking mezcal. I was a gringo estúpido.
My head spinning, I was wondering if it would be smart to switch to tequila when we landed in a legendary barroom called the Kentucky Club. One of several establishments in Mexico that claimed to be the birthplace of the margarita, it was on Avenida Juárez, the lively main drag by the bridge. A nondescript facade masked a manly, wood-detailed interior that had been beckoning Americans across the border since Prohibition. The handsomely burnished bar was said to have been carved in France, and Marilyn Monroe had allegedly sidled up to it. The devil-may-care vibe inspired one of the friends I was with to later propose to his girlfriend there, and perhaps inspired her to say yes.
We were served a round of the famous house margaritas by a poker-faced bartender wearing a crisp white shirt and a black tie. As “A Whiter Shade of Pale” played on the jukebox, we toasted a dusty stuffed raptor frozen in action, its wings spread for flight. Then we drank more. Although I liked to think I was as macho as the steely-eyed matadors staring down at us from faded pictures on the bar’s nicotine-stained walls, I could barely handle my hangover. I would eventually learn that tequila is actually one of many types of mezcal, but I felt so lousy after our Juárez adventure that I thought it might be better to keep clear of any agave distillate in the future.
SINCE I HAD decided that mezcal could only be cheap rocket fuel, I was surprised when, in the late 1990s, I came across a radically different variation at the Standard Market, a gourmet-food store in Santa Fe. Every bottle of mezcal I had previously seen had an embalmed-looking worm in it. But this brand was elegantly packaged in cylindrical containers that were beautifully woven from palm fiber. I picked up one circled by green stripes and tiny triangles suggesting mountains. A wine bottle inside was labeled with an artful graphic, by the late artist Ken Price, of a yellow pot beside a pink house on a green village lane, below a pair of peaks with dark birds soaring overhead. It was from Santo Domingo Albarradas, a community in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, which a smaller label instructed me to pronounce “wa-ha-ka.”
The spirit cost a bracing $45, but I felt strangely compelled, much like Alice when she discovers the tabletop vial with the DRINK ME sign tied to its neck. The clincher, however, was when I found a bottle mispriced for $15. I brought it home and unsealed it by pulling away a thread encased in golden beeswax around the cork—a presentation I had never seen before, and that I imagined must be traditionally Oaxacan. Noting that there was no worm in the bottle, I poured some into a shot glass and held it to the light. Unlike the sickly-yellow mezcals I had previously encountered, 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 ends topped with upturned soda bottles.
Even amid the modern hodgepodge, Oaxaca’s staggering biodiversity was already in evidence. Over six hundred species of birds have been verified in the state, as well as hundreds of mammals, amphibians, and reptiles, and thousands of species of flowering plants. As we made our way into the city, I could see cacti towering in traffic islands, tropical palms swaying in the breeze, and flowering trees with birds and butterflies fluttering through their foliage.
There were also agaves of many shapes and sizes: a preview of why I had come.
JUST AS A coconut-laden palm tree can bring an idyllic beach memory into soft focus, or a majestic organ pipe cactus will make you picture the Wild West, a round, green, spiky agave almost always springs Mexico to mind. The plants naturally occur in an expanse stretching all the way from the northernmost countries of South America, up through Central America, across the Caribbean, and deep into the southwestern U.S. But Mexico, home to the largest and most diverse agave population in the world, is their epicenter. Of the approximately two hundred recognized species (there are undoubtedly more), at least 160 grow in the republic, and about 60 percent are endemic to it.
Although estimates vary, sociologist Sarah Bowen writes in her authoritative book, Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production, “at least twenty species of agave are commonly used in the production of mezcal, with some studies finding upward of forty-two species.” She cites the ongoing research of ethnobotanist Patricia Colunga-García Marín, of the Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán (CICY), who has “found evidence of a history of mezcal production in twenty-four of thirty-one Mexican states and the Federal District of Mexico.”
An agave’s circular leaf structure, called a rosette, is similar to an artichoke’s. Its swordlike (and sometimes thorny-edged) pencas (leaves), tipped by a single needle that can be wickedly sharp, are effective armor for its bulbous middle, which can weigh hundreds of pounds, depending on the species. Mankind has presumably utilized the plants for as long as we’ve lived with them—and not only for making spirits. The word “mezcal” is derived from the Nahuatl words ixcalli (roasted) and metl (agave). The piña’s starchy, nutritious flesh can provide food, when baked, and drink, when the hearts of some species are scooped out and the vitamin-rich aguamiel (nectar) is allowed to collect within the resulting hollow. According to archaeological studies of Mesoamerica, pit-roasted agave hearts have been a food staple since at least 9000 BCE. In the U.S., the Mescalero Apache are named after the mescal agave (Agave parryi) that they still gather in south-central New Mexico for food. In prehistoric North America, the Hohokam culture farmed the plants.
The thick and powerful quiote (inflorescence), which can thrust as high as thirty feet upward from an agave’s center in the final act of its life (anywhere from five to seventy years, depending on the species), can also be eaten, along with the succulent yellow flowers crowning it. The blossoms serve bats, birds, and insects, which act as pollinators in return. Many agave species have a symbiotic relationship with a particularly helpful assistant in this regard. For example, the Mexican long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris nivalis) is a crucial pollen-spreader for A. tequilana.
The stalks have many other uses. They serve as firewood and as material for constructing bamboo-like fences and walls. They’ve also been crafted into surfboards and didgeridoos. The plant’s rigid pencas can be dried and fashioned into crude shelters, and its leaves’ strong ixtle, or pita, fibers can be formed into rope, woven into coarse mats and cloth, or made into baskets and sandals. In the artisanal craft of piteado, the agave’s fine white threads are intricately embroidered into belts, saddles, and other leather goods for charros (cowboys). Its fierce needles have been used as writing instruments, as well as for piercing, poking, or even drawing blood: pre-Hispanic codices depict thorns lancing ears and pricking tongues. As the botanist Howard Scott Gentry puts it in his landmark book Agaves of Continental North America, “The uses of agaves are as many as the arts of man have found it convenient to devise.”
Because they are often seen grouped with desert plants, agaves are commonly considered relatives of cacti or aloe. But they are actually unrelated, for a long time having been a part of the subfamily Agavoideae of the family Asparagaceae before being placed in their own separate family, Agavaceae. Genus Agave was first described in 1753 by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in his groundbreaking two-volume book, Species Plantarum, the springboard for modern plant nomenclature.
The Latin name Agave is derived from the ancient Greek word for noble or splendid, agauós, and that culture’s mythology provides a cautionary tale for drinkers: The daughter of the goddess Harmonia and Cadmus, the king of Thebes, was named Agave. While under a spell from Dionysius, the so-called party god, she mistook her son Pentheus for a lion and tore him apart, limb from limb, during a drunken bacchanal. She didn’t recognize her mistake until she brandished his head before her father.
In 1492, when Christopher Columbus and his three shiploads of men arrived in the Caribbean on a Spanish Crown–sponsored expedition seeking a new route between Europe and Asia, they noticed that the indigenous Taíno people who lived on the islands called agave maguey. The name became part of the Old World’s emerging lexicon for the New World, the Taíno’s Arawakan language also providing roots for the English words “barbeque,” “hammock,” “potato,” “hurricane,” and “canoe.”
Twenty-seven years later, when the gold-hunting Spanish nobleman Hernán Cortés set foot on the shores of what’s now called Mexico, he discovered the Aztecs using the word “metl” for agave in their Nahuatl language. But the Spaniards ignored this, imposing the word “maguey” as part of their conquest. The plants are now generally known as both agave and maguey inside Mexico, and as agave outside it. But among the country’s many remaining ethnic-language groups, they are still identified by a mellifluous assortment of ancient names—tzaatz in Mixe, mai in Huichol, tyoo’ in Chatino, yavi in Mixteco, and ki in Mayan, to name only a few.
The plants can now be found all over the globe. The tough fibers of sisal agaves (Agave sisalana) are harvested to make everything from twine and carpets to lumbar-support belts and scratching posts for cats. They are cultivated in Brazil, Tanzania, Java, China, Haiti, and Madagascar. Among other places, A. tequilana has made a second home in South Africa, where it’s been used to make a non-Mexican version of tequila.
Other species are prized as ornamental plants, particularly in Europe. Agaves bask in the elegant botanical gardens of Nice and Monaco, and in the wonderfully rambling Giardini Botanici Hanbury, which occupies a spectacular forty-five-acre chunk of coastline near the Italian town of Ventimiglia. In the U.S., two of the best collections are found at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. But the intrepid plants are rooted everywhere, from Miami to Golden Gate Park.
It would be hard to imagine a more striking maguey collection than the one overseen by the botanist Dr. Abisaí Josué García-Mendoza in the magnificent garden of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Instituto de Biología, in Mexico City. The extensive assortment of agaves thrives among volcanic stone outcroppings, and is probably the most representative concentration in the world. It’s an excellent spot to wander, imagining the different plants as spirits.
It’s unsurprising that the Zapotec are the largest producers of traditionally crafted mezcal, given that they’ve been cohabitating with agave for at least twenty-five hundred years. As a people, they number an estimated several hundred thousand, predominantly living in Oaxaca, home to the broadest diversity of maguey species in the world. Mezcals are distilled in the state from at least eight different species of the plant, from many varieties within those species, and from combinations of all of the above. With its deep history of ties between man and agave, and with mezcal-making rooted in its cultural heritage, Oaxaca is the spirit’s epicenter.
AS WE APPROACHED the city’s center, Ron nodded at a barren mountaintop to our left, on which, he said, were the legendary ruins of Monte Albán. A mezcal brand had been named after it—Monte Albán—the first large-scale commercial type to be exported from Mexico, in 1975. The pre-Columbian site is thought to date from around 500 BCE and to have been populated by as many as seventeen thousand people. It was a Zapotec stronghold, but was largely abandoned by 1000 CE. I could see that its soaring thirteen-hundred-foot perch would have commanded a strategic and formidable presence. Ahead of us, I caught glimpses of the twin towers of Santo Domingo Church, which was constructed over a two-hundred-year period, beginning in 1570. All around us, it seemed, were stark juxtapositions among the ancient, the old, and the new.
Faustino, who had some business to attend to, stepped out at a busy corner, while Ron and I continued to Mercado de Abastos. One of the biggest street marketplaces in Mexico, it spreads over several city blocks. Ron wanted to begin my introduction to mezcal by taking me to his favorite pulque stall. Pulque, he explained, is a mildly alcoholic pre-Hispanic beverage that’s made mostly from the aguamiel of the Volkswagen Beetle–size Agave salmiana, although other maguey species are also used. The nectar is fermented, like beer, rather than distilled, like mezcal.
Many believe that aguamiel fermentation was as far as indigenous peoples got with agave alcohol before the Spanish introduced them to distillation techniques. But new research debunks this long-held assumption. At the very least, Mesoamericans were enthusiastic experimenters, and their conquerors found them concocting alcoholic beverages from a broad selection of materia prima other than maguey. These included fermented cactus fruit, maize, hog plums, pineapples, coconuts, and honey, as well as various barks and roots—and even chewed tobacco juice and poisonous toads.
As soon as we entered the market, it became apparent that finding the pulque stall wouldn’t be easy, even though Ron had visited it many times before. The place felt like a labyrinth. There were no signs or maps to guide you through its dark, close aisles—only row upon row of vendors hawking a mind-boggling array of everything from underpants and stuffed animals to plastic buckets and power tools. It seemed as if anyone could hang out a shingle and do business. Goods hung on the walls, dangled from the ceilings, and were neatly arranged across the tables of makeshift booths.
There were so many articles that it was hard to make out the vendors amid their wares. But if I lingered for even a moment to take a closer look at a hand-carved wooden chocolate stirrer or a plastic bag of deep-fried pork skins, someone would immediately spring from the shadows and greet me with an enthusiastic “¿Qué tal, güero?” (What’s up, Blondie?) or a “¿Qué necesitas, caballero?” (What do you need, Mister?).
There were no price tags, and haggling was expected—which was how I imagined transactions had always been made there. Refreshingly non-corporate, Abastos felt as if the world’s most ginormous Walmart Supercenter had been gutted, roasted on a spit, chewed up, and regurgitated into the streets, where it had been reinvented under genuinely human terms. The one thing the market shared with big-box stores was that its various zones had particular themes.
An entire section was devoted to cups, bowls, saucers, plates, and almost anything else that could be made with barro (earthenware); another part to the many beautiful flowers of the region; somewhere else to zapatos (shoes) of all shapes and sizes; and yet another area to licuadoras (blenders), tortilladoras (tortilla presses), and other kitchen gadgetry. But unlike the generic Housewares, Sporting Goods, and Cosmetics sections of box stores, each part of the market had multiple vendors selling goods with their own individualized spins—and one could haggle with them for the best possible prices.
The variety of food items was astonishing: fly-covered cow carcasses; congealed pig heads slow-turning on meat hooks; plucked chickens and glistening hunks of goat; moist mounds of mysterious organs and entrails; pyramids of chiles in multiple shapes, sizes, and shades of red; stacks of brown eggs; earthenware bowls filled with moles negro y rojo Oaxaqueños (complex black and red chile sauces, two of seven traditionally made in Oaxaca); balls of string cheese, another local specialty; and an overwhelming selection of fresh breads, fragrant spices, amber honeys, and multihued fruits and vegetables.
Everywhere, hawkers were competing for attention, sticking earth-spackled bunches of onions in our faces, offering us handfuls of roasted pumpkin seeds and ripe tomatoes, or trying to sell us shoulder bags of recycled sugar sacks, in case we wanted to carry anything home. Other vendors called out the names of popular local snacks—tempting us with “Tlayudas . . . tlayudas . . . tlayudas” (baked tortillas loaded with refried beans) and “Nieves . . . nieves . . . nieves” (ices flavored with everything from avocado to leche quemada con tuna—burnt milk and the red fruit of the prickly pear cactus).
Chickens squawked, turkeys gobbled, and boom boxes pumped out ballads crooned over jaunty polka beats as cooks in mom-and-pop food stalls combined the market’s ingredients into aromatic concoctions. Their creations were served to hungry patrons, who squeezed together on benches alongside tables covered with brightly patterned oilcloths. Bowls of fresh salsa and sliced limes—their contents eagerly added to everything—sat at the ready, refilled as soon as they were emptied.
Ron asked directions of a girl mixing cacao seeds, sugar, and almonds into a hand-cranked chocolate grinder; sampled a few crunchy, chile-roasted chapulines (grasshoppers) from the basket of an elderly woman; and made further inquiries of a vendor selling a pair of forlornly honking geese before we finally, almost miraculously, arrived at a nondescript stall with a hand-painted sign: REFRESQUERIA ANITA, PULQUE Y TEPACHE.
Below the sign sat Anita herself. Completely indifferent to the incongruous pair of gabachos (foreigners) who appeared before her, she had the thousand-yard stare of someone who, as Ron cryptically put it, “has seen a lot of people explode into flames.”
Two earthenware vessels—one containing pulque, the other tepache (a traditional drink fermented from pineapple)—rested on the counter in front of her. She took off the pulque jar’s metal lid, ladled a white foamy liquid into two jícaras (traditional cups made from halved dried gourds), and passed them to us. The drink felt cool through the hard vegetal skin and smelled mildly acidic. But as I was about to take a cautious sip, Ron stopped me with a light touch to my forearm before carefully tilting his jícara and sprinkling a few drops of pulque onto the ground.
“For the Earth Mother,” he said. “She always drinks first.”
The libation, which tasted sweet and sour and citrusy, traveled down my throat with a slightly alcoholic kick. From the way Ron was gauging my reaction, I could tell we weren’t just having a beer here. So I took my time, slowly drank some more, and soon found out why. Deep into my second pulque, I began feeling decidedly different. It wasn’t at all like I had felt when drinking beer, mezcal, or anything else I had tried before. Indeed, with my sensory faculties suddenly heightened, the market now seemed like a vivid Takashi Murakami–Frida Kahlo mash-up.
Ron put it another way: “Pulque is psychedelic, man!”
NO ONE KNOWS exactly when people began making and drinking pulque—only that, when Cortés arrived on the shores of what is now Mexico, it was integral to the religious observances of the polytheistic Aztecs, who were the dominant ethnic group at the time. The sacred drink, which they called iztac octli (white wine), was also used by other indigenous societies of the central highlands, where the agaves for pulque-brewing grow naturally. It was particularly prominent in the religious ceremonies of the Mixtec and Zapotec cultures in the region now known as Oaxaca.
The process for making the drink has changed little over the centuries. The agave species harvested for pulque are generally much larger than those grown for mezcal and are also juicier. When a pulque-producing plant matures, usually at around twelve years, the sprouting of its enormous quiote signals the appropriate time to harvest its bountiful nectar, which surges in volume as the agave directs energy to its center. A hole is cut into the middle of the maguey and the heart scooped out, leaving an open hollow where aguamiel collects. Pulque agaves can yield between one and two gallons of sap per day, and some continue to do so for several months.
The liquid is continuously removed and transferred to vats and other containers. Unlike beer, which requires yeast, pulque is fermented with bacteria. A hundred years ago, when immigrant brewers found their beers in competition with the traditional native drink, they propagandized the superstition that muñecas (cloth satchels of feces) were added to pulque to spur its fermentation. Whether this happened or not, there’s no doubt that the concoction is highly perishable and must be consumed quickly. When the drink would go bad, the Aztecs called the spoiled, foul-smelling libation octli poliuhqui (spoiled pulque)—perhaps this was how the Spanish got the name for pulque.
Although pulque was by far the most important, all sorts of other fermented alcoholic beverages were crafted in Mesoamerica: matzaoctli (pineapple wine), xoco octli (wine made with the “hog plums” of genus Spondias), tlaoloctli (maize wine), and capuloctli (wine made from the cherries of Prunus capuli), among other potent drinks capable of causing altered states of consciousness.
It has long been assumed that no one there knew about spirits-distillation until the Spanish came and showed them. But in recent years, mezcal-making experiments have been performed using replicas of two-tiered pre-Columbian clay pots, for which the previously assumed use was bean-cooking. A team of scientists, mezcal producers, and archaeologists placed fermented agave mash in the bottoms of the bean-pot “stills,” heated them from below, and collected the resulting condensations from the upper halves. The alcohol contents suggested that it was entirely possible that indigenous peoples knew how to distill. A recent ethnoarchaeological study confirms this.
Along with alcoholic beverages, the conquistadors found natives using such mind-altering substances as peyotl (Lophophora williamsii, or peyote cactus “buttons”), teonanácatl (Psilocybe fungi, or so-called magic mushrooms), and ololiuhqui (Ipomoea violacea L., or morning glory seeds). Yet no substance was quite so venerated in the Aztec world as pulque, which was believed to be a form of divine breast milk.
The Aztecs worshipped multiple gods, who governed many different aspects of their world. There were the feathered serpent-god Quetzalcóatl (ruling the planet Venus, arts, crafts, wind, dawn, and knowledge) and Tezcatlipoca (overseeing sorcery, thievery, and the dark sides of life). Their sacred maguey goddess, Mayahuel, is usually depicted in codices in the company of a flowering agave and a vessel of pulque, much like the one Anita had on the counter of her stall. She is also shown with multiple breasts, for nursing pulque to the Centzon Totochtin, the four hundred rabbit-moon pulque gods who represented the infinite forms that intoxication could assume.
According to one myth, Mayahuel was a lovely maiden who lived in the sky with her grandmother, one of the devilish tzitzimime (star-gods) that tried to keep the sun from rising. One day, Mayahuel was swept away by Quetzalcóatl, and as they were entwined in a verdant tree, her angry grandmother sent some of her cohorts to destroy them. Quetzalcóatl managed to escape, but Mayahuel was chopped to bits. After her lover returned and buried her remains, they sprouted into agaves, which is why she was considered the mother of all maguey.
The Aztecs are often considered warlike, superstitious, and legendary for ghoulish human sacrifices, which they performed in the tens of thousands. But they were hardly unsophisticated, and were skilled in astronomy and medicine. The Spaniards were awestruck by their capital, Tenochtitlán, a city of splendid buildings and canals that occupied an island with an altitude of 7,350 feet in the middle of Lake Texcoco. It had a population of over two hundred thousand at the time, more people than in London, and has evolved over the centuries into Mexico City, which now has over twenty-one million inhabitants in its greater metropolitan area.
The Aztecs were wary of the destructive potential of alcohol over their society, and they revered the power of intoxication. Because of the dual nature of pulque—that is, nourishing and damaging in equal measure—its use was strictly regulated. No one younger than fifty-two was allowed to drink it regularly, except for pregnant women, priests, and sacrificial victims. Anyone else caught swilling pulque might be executed.
Yet, with the disintegration of Aztec culture during the Spanish Conquest, pulque found its way into mainstream use. By the nineteenth century, there were pulque bars all over Mexico City, and agave plantations supplied a national thirst for the drink, which was celebrated in art, music, and literature. Just as tobacco, once revered by the Aztecs as a sacred herb, became a source of addiction, so pulque lost its honored place and alcohol abuse became widespread.
WE BEGAN FINDING our way back through the dizzying market. Ron led me past bustling women in flowered aprons and men hauling handcarts laden with goods. We stopped at a stall where Ron knew the friendly proprietor. She served us steaming bowls of goat stew. We topped them with salsa, chopped cabbage, pinches of cilantro, and squeezes of lime, then wolfed down our comida (lunch) with warm corn tortillas that came wrapped in an embroidered cloth napkin tucked inside a straw basket.
“There’s an ancient Huaxtec legend,” Ron told me between bites of goat, “that warns of the dangers of the fifth pulque. That’s the one that gets you really fucked up! After drinking five cups, a chieftain got naked and scandalized his tribe.”
Since I was still feeling the effects of just two pulques, I could only imagine what drinking five might be like. Yet it was interesting to imbibe something so deeply rooted in the past of this place. Was I feeling the same way as others had a hundred years ago, or a thousand, or even more? Or had something been lost in translation—certain sensations, or a higher consciousness that one was meant to tune into?
It was impossible to know, but I could just as easily have asked the same questions after eating chocolate, which had also originated in Mesoamerica, possessing its own sacred role in Aztec religion before becoming molded into Hershey’s Kisses on assembly lines. But not once during my chocolate-consuming life had it occurred to me to wonder about its history for even a second.
There was something else, too. Looking around, I could see how it might be fun to get to know your favorite chocolate vendor, talk to her about where her cacao beans had come from and who had grown them, and ask her to grind them just so. Here, it seemed, shoppers weren’t so much interested in products as in ingredients and the people and stories behind them.
OUR BELLIES FULL of goat stew and the pulque still in our systems, we emerged from the darkened recesses of Abastos Market into the blazing sun that pounded the wide boulevard outside. This may have been the rainy season, but it could be incredibly hot anyway. The traffic lanes were clogged with a slow-moving procession of taxis decorated with elaborate floral arrangements and brightly colored crêpe streamers. It was fiesta day for the Oaxacan cabbies, and they were having fun making their way around town, honking the horns of their taxis and blasting salsa music through their stereo speakers.
Ron told me that fiestas are almost a daily occurrence in Oaxaca—mostly held for religious observances. But there were also some esoteric ones, such as Noche de Rábanos (Radish Night), which takes place in December. For this annual competition, the crimson root vegetables (a Spanish introduction) are painstakingly carved into saints, nativity scenes, and human figures, then displayed in the town plaza. The winning sculpture appears in local newspapers. I wondered if Ron was pulling my leg—until I came across a postcard of a disturbingly depicted radish-person. That’s probably how I look to most people who live here, I thought: pink and strange.
Across the boulevard from the market were a couple of bodegas selling mezcal. I followed Ron between the taxis to one of them, a dimly lit shop. As my eyes adjusted, I could see a broad assortment of vessels: plastic garrafones (jugs, or jerry cans), glass bottles of various shapes and sizes, hand-painted gourds, and crudely made clay vessels. A number of ceramic containers were shaped like changos (monkeys), and others had been garishly formed and painted as lactating breasts and ejaculating penises. Ron explained that mezcal is widely considered an aphrodisiac.
There were also bottles of pink, baby blue, and caramel-colored cremas (cream-flavored mezcals), as well as expensive especial mezcals, like pechuga (breast), named after the chicken part traditionally hung in the still vapor during pechuga distillation, and tobalá, made from the wild-grown Agave potatorum. Ron speculated that both these fancier types were likely fakes. Bottled mezcals of varying shades of brown (reposados and añejos) were allegedly barrel aged—but Ron said many makers just added dye. Last, but not least, a huge glass jar on the shop counter held brackish-looking mezcal and several inches of what appeared to be wrinkled pinkish-red worms.
Despite my previous misadventures with crummy mezcal, I had managed to get this far without ever having eaten the notorious worm. I was relieved to learn there was no point in ever devouring one. Ron explained that the iconic creature wasn’t really a worm at all, but usually the edible larvae of the Hypopta agavis moth. It’s commonly found on magueys, although sometimes the larva of the agave snout weevil (Scyphophorus acupunctatus, or picudo del agave) is used instead.
I had always assumed that putting worms in mezcal was a long-standing Mexican tradition. But the idea has been attributed to Jacobo Lozano Páez, a mezcal bottler who had first moved to Mexico City from the state of Coahuila to study art. Instead, he ended up working in a liquor store before launching the brand Gusano Rojo (Red Worm) in the early 1950s. The rumored hallucinatory effects of “eating the worm” are unfounded. But new tests have shown that mezcals with worms exhibit higher levels of cis-3-Hexen-1-ol. The grassy-smelling, plant-produced, oily compound—used in perfumes—acts as a pheromone for some insects and mammals, although its aphrodisiac effects remain unproven in humans.
According to Ron, larvae were probably the drink’s least offensive additives. He guessed that, if tested, most of the shop’s mezcal would likely contain more sinister ingredients: food coloring, cane alcohol, fertilizers, pesticides, and other nasty chemicals used to accelerate the fermentation process, kill agave pests, and otherwise mess with what, he insisted, should be an entirely natural process—from the cultivation of the agaves to the making of the spirits.
“A good mezcal,” Ron pronounced, “should always smell of sweet roasted maguey!”
As if on cue, the girl behind the shop counter offered me a plastic cup brimming with a yellowish sample from the larvae-filled jar. I held it to my nose and inhaled a bracingly powerful bouquet: a touch of gasoline, hints of paint thinner and fresh asphalt, and what appeared to be a long, dry, smooth finish of airplane-toilet aroma. It smelled just like that first mezcal I had tried in Baltimore.
I handed it back to the girl, and we left.
I WAS CURIOUS to see more of Oaxaca de Juárez, but Ron had other ideas. He kept a place in a nearby Zapotec community called Teotitlán del Valle, to which we were now headed. This was where he kept a warehouse, and where he hand-bottled the five varieties of “single village” mezcal he bought for export to the U.S. The community was also where he lived when he wasn’t at home in Taos, New Mexico. I gathered, though, that Ron spent much of his time on the road, promoting and selling Del Maguey mezcal. He appeared to enjoy this, although it seemed to be an expensive undertaking.
We drove southeast from the city down a stretch of Highway 190, over what had once been an important road connecting the ancient settlements of Monte Albán, Yagul, and Mitla. Now it was a very tiny segment of the Pan-American Highway, a 29,800-mile route extending all the way from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Argentina. When the Mexican portion was completed in 1950, an annual speed race was created to commemorate the feat. The grueling La Carrera Panamericana, which followed the road the length of Mexico, was so dangerous that the race was canceled after only five years.
A tamer version of the fabled event was revived in 1988, and two members of Pink Floyd made a film about driving it. The posh race for the classic-car crowd was hard to imagine, however, because the road was a roughly surfaced two-lane blacktop with abundant baches (potholes) and topes (speed bumps). Even so, its condition did nothing to discourage the evidently fearless colectivo (shared-taxi) drivers from darting through the traffic at breakneck speeds, in what for them was a daily road race.
As the strong equatorial sun dropped behind the mountains, we rolled through a vast valley, passing fields of agave, corn, beans, and squash, then strangely shaped hills studded with shrubby trees, cacti, and scrub-covered ruins. Dotted here and there around the plains, small settlements were set against the bases of the steep, cloud-cloaked ridges towering around us. White-walled mission churches with red-tiled roofs rose above the communities: souvenirs of the Spanish colonization. We were now in the Zapoteca—the territory of the Zapotec. Ron pointed out wide swaths, cut straight down the slopes between the trees, that appeared to have been made for power lines but were actually boundary markers between municipios (municipalities), communally cleared each year.
Much of Oaxacan land still falls under the ejido system. This form of land tenure was established after the Mexican Revolution and was put into practice on a large scale in the 1930s. The idea was to provide a way for landless farmers to establish and communally maintain specific parcels for agricultural purposes, following the takeover of their community holdings by haciendas in the nineteenth century. In 1992, the sale and privatization of ejido land was permitted after an adjustment of Article 27 in the Mexican constitution, and increases in poverty and migration have been attributed to the change.
Mexico’s thirty-one states are subdivided into 2,440 municipalities. Oaxaca has 570 municipalities, a very large number—the huge state of Baja has only five. Four hundred and eighteen follow the usos y costumbres (traditions and customs) system of indigenous self-governance. The government structure for all municipalities in the country was defined in the constitution in 1917. Every municipio must have an alcalde (mayor), regidores (councilmen), and a síndico (attorney general). In municipalities that choose to follow usos y costumbres, men hold official positions under an unpaid cargo (administrative work) system, and perform short-term community projects under an unpaid tequio (labor tax) system. In some Zapotec communities, men are required to complete at least fifteen years of unpaid services before they turn sixty. Migrants to the U.S. often pay others to complete their duties instead of returning home.
While driving, Ron gave me some background on his introduction to mezcal, using anecdotes that he often shared with others. He had first come through the area in 1970, when he and two buddies piled into a van to drive the “Pan-Am” from California to Panama on a spur-of-the-moment road trip. “We just wanted to see where the road went,” he shrugged. But it was during this journey, which ended up lasting months, that Ron initially visited Teotitlán del Valle. He had liked it so much, he said, he returned two decades later to work on various art projects, some in collaboration with master Zapotec weavers from the village, which is known for its finely woven tapetes (rugs) made of hand-spun, naturally dyed wool.
As a young artist, Ron was associated with the Light and Space movement, which originated in Southern California in the late 1960s and included figures like Robert Irwin and James Turrell. In those days, Ron fabricated sculpture combining light and architectural elements to form contemplative environments. “Growing up in Ojai, light and space were really important to me,” he explained. “So I tried to paint on air, with these floating volumes of light made with beams crossing in complementary colors. It was the beginning of minimalism. It was the beginning of not using imagery. I decided to make works related to my experience, and not to art history.”
As an art student in Southern California, in the early 1960s, Ron tried a mass-produced mezcal on a foray across the border to Hussong’s Cantina, a famous surfer hangout in Ensenada, Mexico. “I was the fool with the bottle upturned in my mouth, swallowing the worm,” he laughed. Ron’s interest in the traditionally crafted mezcal he began exporting didn’t begin until his visit to Teotitlán in 1970, when he first became acquainted with Oaxaca’s micro-distilled agave spirits. None were fabricated in the village itself, but as he started exploring the larger region in the early 1990s, he began finding mezcals that spoke to him—some of which he discovered through word of mouth, others by showing up at remote mountain villages and asking around. When Ron tried crossing the U.S. border with several large vessels of mezcal, a customs official allowed him to bring in only a tiny amount, and the seed was sown for Del Maguey.
“This whole thing started because I wanted to be able to share the amazing mezcals I’d found with my friends,” he said.
The spirits Ron began exporting under his label in 1995 were not being fabricated on anything close to a commercial scale. Handcrafted by maestros mezcaleros in small batches for consumption in their villages, they were mostly shared at fiestas, weddings, funerals, and other important events. If they were sold beyond their own vicinity, it was more often than not to brokers or bottlers, who bought them in bulk and blended them with batches from other communities. When this happened, both the hand of the maker and the village identity were lost, because the different mezcals were combined to create nondescript products—often with cane alcohol supplemented to stretch them out—which were then sold under labels revealing nothing of their true origins. Hence Ron’s coinage of the term “single village mezcal.”
As he discovered what pure mezcal expressions could taste like, he reveled in their possible diversity. He found that, aside from each maker’s individual touch, which had often been honed over several generations within a family, the flavor of a mezcal, like that of wine, could be accentuated by anything from the microclimates in which the agaves had been grown, to the airborne yeasts that initiated the fermentation process, to the minerals in the local water added to the mash.
I had always imagined importers of spirits as cigar-chomping gangster types cutting shady deals in harbor warehouses—Sydney Greenstreet, or James Cagney. While I knew this couldn’t always be true, it seemed safe to assume that Ron must be unusual in the profession, since he viewed his mezcal business as an expression of his art. The transition from creating his light-and-space works to selling mezcal made sense to him—he was interested in the transformative nature of the spirits. By turning people on to mezcal, Ron could transport them to contemplative places that were similar to his light installations in their emotional and psychological effects. At the same time, the drinks he exported brought him attention as an artist-importer, which he didn’t seem to mind.
As we turned north from the highway to Teotitlán del Valle, and headed up a road toward the Sierra Juárez soaring in the dusk, I found myself wondering about the people who actually created the spirits in Ron’s finely packaged bottles. Who were they, and what were they like? Was the surely difficult work of making mezcal a form of contemporary art for them, too?
THE ROAD CONTINUED all the way up to the remote mountain village of Benito Juárez, named after the beloved Zapotec president who governed Mexico for five terms, between 1858 and 1872. But we would be traveling on it only as far as Teotitlán del Valle, which came into view once we topped a foothill. The community is a cluster of one- and two-story structures of concrete, brick, and stone, with brightly colored metal doors leading into them. Around five thousand people live there. Founded around 1465, the village was originally named Xaquija (Celestial Constellation) in Zapoteco. A white church, Preciosa Sangre de Cristo, rises from the center. It is overshadowed by a sacred butte-shaped peak, called Cerro Gie Betts (stone brother) in the local dialect.
We passed several weaving workshops displaying tapetes on their outside walls. Many of the rugs had geometric patterns that were inspired by the ancient reliefs carved into the stones of a local Zapotec temple. In the sixteenth century, as part of their imposition of Roman Catholicism, the Spanish tore the indigenous structure down to its foundations and began incorporating its pieces into the church. Construction began in 1581 and was finally completed in 1758.
Ron drove us past the weed-covered temple ruins and parked his truck near a large courtyard, which we walked across to the whitewashed church. There he showed me a beautifully carved pre-Columbian stone motif that had been laid bare amid the plaster. “Check that out!” Ron said, pointing. The Spanish conquerors, he said, “may have forced them to adopt a new religion, but they still haven’t forgotten the old one.” The ancient glyph was a silent reminder of a complex culture that had been conquered by another and had melded with it, its evolution into something new still going on.
Ron had invited me to stay with him in the village, where he kept a sparse apartment in a nondescript building near the center. He showed me one of his recent artworks, which consisted of a book bolted to a colorful piece of scrap metal from a canning company. The book’s cover was a black-and-white photo of María Sabina, the Mazatec curandera (medicine woman) who became famous in the 1960s for her ceremonial use of Psilocybe “magic” mushrooms—and for the subsequent visits she received from rock stars of the era. The region continues to attract seekers looking for answers via mind-altering fungi, plants, and other substances. To this day, Sabina remains a hippie icon, her image depicted on posters and T-shirts all over Oaxaca.
He had decorated an altar with vases of fresh flowers, pictures of saints, and offerings of mezcal, mostly contained in used plastic water bottles. He picked up one that had TOBALÁ and a date written on it with a black marker. He poured us each a taste into two clay cups that, I assumed, were traditional Oaxacan. They turned out to have been of his own invention: stamped with his company’s name, they were used for marketing and promotion. Sipping mezcal from a neutral-tasting clay vessel, he explained, delivered a more “honest” flavor experience than drinking it from a glass.
“Wait until you taste this,” he said. “It’s going to blow your mind!”
I had never tried tobalá before, and it was smooth and delicate, like a tear from a mermaid’s eye—or so I imagined in my first, cautious usage of booze jargon. I soon felt deeply relaxed and pleasantly tired. As crickets sang and rain began drizzling outside the moonlit windows, Ron offered me an air mattress and a colorfully striped serape blanket. I drifted into deep slumber.
My bed having completely deflated, I awoke, shivering, on the hard, cold floor. My first thought was to warm up with another nip from the altar, but Ron, who was already up and about, handed me a ceramic bowl of strong black coffee instead. For my Mountainfreak assignment, Ron had offered to take me to visit the producers he bought mezcal from in Santo Domingo Albarradas. That was several hours away, and I was eager to see where that first artisanal agave spirit I had tasted in Santa Fe was from—and to meet the people who had made it.
WITH ROOSTERS CROWING all around Teotitlán del Valle, we drove to the market in the village center to find something to eat on the road. A miniature version of Abastos, it was already lively. Ron was well acquainted with many of the vendors, most of whom were women wearing aprons and shawls pulled tight against the morning chill. Many were selling tortillas and tamales they had cooked at home and were keeping warm in embroidered-cloth bundles stored in beautifully woven fabric bags. We bought some empanadas filled with chicken and mole negro, and their mouthwatering smell filled the truck cab as we left town and headed farther south on Highway 190.
The rising sun revealed a morning mist shrouding the valley. It slowly burned off as we passed the pre-Columbian ruins of Yagul, which date to approximately 500 BCE and occupy a volcanic outcrop just north of the busy thoroughfare. Here and there were expansive fields of agaves that local magueyeros (maguey farmers—also, mezcal workers) had planted for distilling, and we passed a couple of primitive fábricas de mezcal (mezcal stills, also called palenques), which had been set up for tourists.
“Let’s stop and take a look,” Ron said, pulling over by one of them.
He briefly walked me through the mezcal-making process. Two men were piling split piñas around a circular, fifteen-foot-deep horno. Once heaped inside it, the agaves would be covered with earth and baked atop wood-fired rocks for several days, until their starchy white flesh was cooked brown with caramelized sugars. The hearts would then be transferred to a circular milling area where they would be pulverized under a tahona (a massive round millstone—usually pulled by a horse, a mule, or a pair of bulls). The resulting mash would be transferred to several wooden tinas (fermentation vats), where it would stew for perhaps a week or more into a bubbling brown soup.
Finally, the fermented mash and liquid would be introduced to the belly of an alembique de cobre (copper still) that was heated from below by a wood fire. The heat would separate the alcohol from the rest of the mixture, so that it would collect as vapor at the top of the still. From there, the alcohol would move, drop by drop, through a long copper tubo (pipe) that extended between the still and a water-filled cooling tank. The pipe corkscrewed into the water, disappeared at the bottom, and emerged from the tank’s base. When the still was in operation, clear mezcal would steadily drip from it into a container.
To my uneducated eye, the operation appeared dirty, makeshift, and archaic—almost like a rustic display one might find in a living museum—and I wondered if it was hokey. But Ron said it was actually more or less the way most mezcal fábricas looked and worked in Oaxaca, and was pretty much how things had been for hundreds of years.
“Appearances can be deceiving,” Ron cautioned. “Some of the distillers around here are amazing artists.”
We hit the road again. Turning north, we aimed toward Mitla, a Zapotec settlement featuring a ceremonial site whose oldest buildings dated from 450 to 700 CE. If Monte Albán had been the political center of the ancient Zapotec, Mitla was their religious one. Its ruins are noted for their uniquely detailed mosaics and fretwork, a Mixtec style. After we passed Mitla, the valley narrowed, and we turned and headed north on a tinier road that switchbacked down into a deep green expanse. As we entered a village at the bottom, Ron spotted a semi, its license plate from the Mexican state of Jalisco, loaded with small, prematurely harvested piñas.
“They’re taking away our goddamn babies!” he growled.
AT THAT TIME in Jalisco, the state where tequila is predominantly produced, there was a major agave shortage, which was partly a cyclical occurrence. When prices for agaves drop, farmers become unenthusiastic about planting them, with the result that the supply of harvestable magueys ceases to match the enormous international demand for tequila. This time the scarcity was largely due to a severe blight attributed to the fungus Fusarium oxysporum and the bacteria erwinia carotovora, which collectively caused TMA: tristeza y muerte de agave (wilting and death of maguey). As many as 40 percent of the country’s two hundred million A. tequilana plants had been affected, causing a massive crisis for one of Mexico’s biggest exports. Unable to compete, many small-scale tequila distilleries shut their doors.
Magueys may appear formidable, but despite their spiky defense systems, there exists a tiny David to the plant’s Goliath: the agave snout weevil. The black, inch-long beetle is considered the most destructive vector of blight. First, it uses its needlelike proboscis to burrow a hole into the center of the rosette. There, it both lays eggs and infects its host with fungi and bacteria damaging enough to kill the maguey. As the plant sickens, the beetle larvae chew through its weakened tissues—now made soft and munchable for a hungry grub—and the once-mighty agave loses its color and wilts to the ground like a forlorn gabacho doubled over with a bad case of turista (diarrhea).
In the wild, the most disease-resistant magueys propagate and secure the continued survival of their species via an arsenal of methods—through seeds, through small plants growing from their flowers, and through shoots sent out from their bases that develop into baby agaves, which are clones. But when non-resistant plants are cloned and grown in a corporate-scale monoculture, as they are by the tequila industry, they become particularly vulnerable to weevil-borne infections—and disaster can strike.
Ron said the situation was so dire that Jaliscan trucks were coming to Oaxaca from hundreds of miles away to haul off the local maguey crop. According to the legal requirements of tequila’s DO, if a spirit is labeled TEQUILA 100% AGAVE, it should have been distilled only from A. tequilana. But the Jaliscan semi we saw was filled with piñas of espadín, the maguey species most commonly grown for mezcal. This particular agave is normally harvested within eight to ten years, but much younger plants were now being uprooted to address the needs of the tequila industry. Ron said it was very likely that other regional maguey species were also being ransacked. Furthermore, local agave prices had risen significantly—a turn of events that put Oaxacan mezcaleros in the position of not being able to afford the local maguey, while witnessing the sell-off of their future materia prima.
“Who keeps an eye on all of this?” I asked Ron.
“No one,” he replied, shaking his head.
Oaxaca was beginning to feel like the Wild West.
WE WOUND OUR way up to, then through, the village of Santa María Albarradas, which clings to a steep slope at around fifty-five hundred feet. From there, Ron steered us onto a muddy track that continued upward into the hills. We were now surrounded by dense forests of pine and oak trees hung with Spanish moss the color of seafoam and dangling bromeliads still dripping with the previous night’s rain. The route grew rough with potholes as we made our way up and down hills and around bends, then sloshed through streams rushing faster as it began raining yet again.
After several bumpy miles, I began feeling hungry and unwrapped one of the empanadas we had brought along for breakfast. It was still warm and delicious. But soon after wolfing it down, I felt strange chest pains and an alarming tingling sensation in my left arm. Given my family history of heart ailments, I began to panic.
“Ron,” I said, “we need to go back. I’m having a heart attack.”
“No way, compadre. We’re hours away from the closest hospital. If you’re going to die, you’re going to die.”
“Come on! I’m not kidding!”
“It’s just that greasy empanada you ate.”
“Empanadas don’t make your arm tingle!”
“We just need to get some mezcal in you, and you’ll be fine.”
“I don’t believe this!”
“Look, if you die, I promise I’ll bring your parents out here so they can see where it happened.”
Just then, we rounded a corner and saw Santo Domingo Albarradas tumbling down the steep mountainside beneath us. A thick white mist, which almost completely concealed the deep valley below, was fingering up into the towering peaks above us, and it seemed as if we must have been significantly higher than we actually were. Indeed, Ron’s bottle label said the “pueblo elevation is 8,500 ft.” However, according to Google Earth it sits at around five thousand feet. He downshifted as we descended the muddy track into the community, slowly passing a whitewashed mission church decorated with flowers and streamers. A brass band was playing in front, and noisy fireworks were being set off in all directions. Ron had perfectly timed our arrival to coincide with the start of the Zapotec village’s annual fiesta. It was an impressive sleight of hand, but all I could think of was death.
“This is straight out of Under the Volcano,” I moaned. “I’m gonna die here!”
“Then maybe I can have you buried by the church,” he joked.
Ron navigated the truck down a steep, winding street and through the village, past fluttering chickens and tethered burros, finally pulling up next to a nondescript one-story adobe. It belonged to Espiridion Morales Luis, who, with his son, Juan, made the mezcal I had tasted in Santa Fe. Espiridion was away performing one of his civic duties for the Zapotec municipio. But Juan came out to greet us, cheerfully ushering us into the family kitchen—a cozy, rustic room with chicks sprinting across its hard-packed dirt floor. His mother was cooking tortillas on a comal, a basic wood-fired griddle. She served us each a bowl of hot chocolate, while Ron explained to our hosts that I thought I was having a heart attack. Juan quickly produced an unmarked bottle of mezcal that he and his father had distilled in their fábrica.
“¡Sólo necesitas un poco de medicina!” (You just need a little medicine!) Juan poured me a glass.
I took a sip, Juan’s eyes carefully measuring my reaction as the family mezcal calmed my nerves and delivered the familiar clearheaded high I had discovered when I first drank it in Santa Fe. After a few more sips, my chest pains vanished and the tingling in my left arm began to recede. I was cured!
Meanwhile, Ron presented the maestro mezcalero with an official certificate from the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, an annual tasting event where the Luis mezcal had been awarded the platinum prize—the highest honor presented. But the realm of First World arbiters seemed distant. Juan politely accepted the framed document, then set it aside and poured us another round.
A visit to their fábrica—reachable by a treacherous, muddy path down the mountainside—was out of the question because too much rain had fallen. But we could hear music and cheering from the village plaza nearby, so we wandered over to see what was happening. On a basketball court set between government buildings, competing teams from rival villages were duking it out for a grand prize. A brass band serenaded the players from the second story of the town hall, while hundreds of onlookers followed the game with rapt attention.
As I listened to the upbeat polka-infused music, watched the kids play hoops, and gazed into the misty valley plunging below, I realized that this wasn’t at all how I had expected Santo Domingo Albarradas to be. It wasn’t the romanticized village Howard visits in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; nor was it a fantasy Wonderland populated by smoking caterpillars and grinning cats; and it wasn’t as colorful as the picture on Del Maguey’s bottle label. It was just what it was, and I knew I had to come back for more.
