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For the Pristine and Expressive

Certain towns have very specific fingerprints. We would claim that Cenizos from Nombre de Dios and the Pichomels from San Luis Atolotitlán have such a recognizable profile that most times, even if different producers make them, you’ll inequivocally identify them at a blind tasting.

Santa Catarina Albarradas takes this to a whole new level. Regardless of which agave you may be tasting (Jabalí, Sierra Negra, Tepextate, Cucharilla (a  type of Dasylirion), and Tobalá have been what we’ve sampled) or the hand of the producer, these mezcales always share a unique set of flavors and aromas.

While writing this newsletter, we did a tiny tasting to further elaborate in this direction. We know that the world of clay-distilled spirits can be obscure and expensive. We can’t even imagine how much a claypot mezcal tasting would cost in the US. Maybe upwards of 100 dollars? Fortunately, we have a rather comprehensive collection of spirits at hand, so we poured a bit of clay-distilled mezcalitos to compare and contrast. This is what we sampled:

1. Penca Verde made by Casa Celis in San Pedro Totomachapan.
2. Cuish made by Esencia Minera in Santa Catarina Minas.
3. Orejón made by Eduardo Ángeles in Santa Catarina Minas.
4. Espadín made by Heladio López Luis in Santa Catarina Minas.
5. Arroqueño made by Rolando Ángeles in Santa Catarina Minas.
6. Cuish made by Ortegas in Santa Catarina Albarradas.
7. Tobalá made by Rubén López in Santa Catarina Albarradas.

First of all, this was an incredibly delicious exercise. It may sound silly, but when you are only tasting claypot distilled agaves, they all share that same level of complexity that it is almost intimidating to go through the whole lineup. We tend to be very fast tasters, but here we had to take our sweet time and come back over and over again. After doing this, we are not even sure if we could use a single adjective to identify what clay pots bring to the final spirit. What we are sure of is that the spirits of Santa Catarina Albarradas do not share much with any of the other spirits that we tried. They are indeed in a complete league of their own.

We believe that agave spirits are the perfect conjunction of art, engineering, and agriculture (culture) and of soil type, altitude, biome, and weather patterns (territory). When discussing the Tobalá produced by Rubén López in Santa Catarina Albarradas, each of these aspects is as unique as it can get. We’ll explore them in detail during the whole month, so don’t forget to follow our Instagram and Facebook. But in a nutshell, we could say that it would be impossible to replicate the conditions in which this expression is made anywhere around Mexico. The last time we were there, we had the chance to stay for a full day, asking every question we could imagine. In some places,, they have distant memories of how mezcal used to be made, but here, the memories are still tangible: there are still traces of old “hornos” up in the mountain, because back then it was easier to bring the horno to the maguey than pushing the agave all the way to the palenque; some producers still have active bull-hide fermentation vessels; you hear Zapotec blasting through the town’s “perifoneo” (loudspeaker) giving the daily news and clay pots are the only distillation tools on sight.

Finding Rubén López

Most of the time, we take great pride in taking the most extravagant trips to find obscure and amazing producers. But this time, reaching Rubén was slightly more surprising. It all started through a Maguey Melate member.

A few months ago, Chava (who is writing this newsletter) received a mysterious email from Julia García. She works works with Boston with  Mark Renzi, who has been a long-time Maguey Melate member and clearly a vocal enthusiast. First there was a Zoom call, where she introduced us to his father, Cesar García. Then, we recorded a fascinating episode about Cesar’s take on the limitation of the mezcal’s DO. And finally, while recording that podcast, he gave Chava a few samples of Rubén’s mezcales. Immediately, after taking a few sips, it was very clear that they belonged inside of a Melate bottle.

In many ways, we love how the small but mighty community of agave nerds can help each other. We probably would have never reached Rubén without this introduction, so we can’t thank you enough Mark Renzi for creating the spark that resulted in this feature.

If we had a specific intention in featuring this spirit, we would say that it is to exemplify how expressive a mezcal can be when produced in the most pristine conditions. It is hard to describe, but even the air and the water in Santa Catarina Albarradas feel like no human influence has ever tainted them. And the same happens with Rubén’s craft. He doesn’t have to remember how things “used to be”, he embodies the ancestral ways of making and enjoying mezcal. We hope you guys enjoy this time capsule of a spirit as much as we did.

Saludcita de la buena!

Follow along throughout the month on facebook or instagram to get all the videos, fun facts, and conversations about this month’s feature. Some topics to look forward to include:

• More on Santa Catarina Albarradas and the many traditions that have persisted in this town beyond mezcal.
• A few words on black clay (barro negro) and its relevance for storing and transporting mezcal. Before there were wooden barrels, clay was there to save the day.
• A few ideas that Cesar expressed in the podcast that we recorded that we think could significantly improve the current mezcal Denomination of Origin.

Quote of the Month

” Since I was a child we’ve been working with Tobalás. My father taught me how to harvest it, and back then it was one of the most poular magueyes”

Rubén López Diego