The Delicious Desert

Biodiversity Distilled

(Excuse my Spanglish)

Why Care About Biodiversity?

Right before I started writing this newsletter, I saw a short video featuring the biologist Marc-André Selosse, who talked about biodiversity and how, to his eyes, it is the key to a prosperous and joyous future. We all know we are losing all sorts of animal and plant species at alarming rates, but he mentioned something novel to me: he claimed we can also map this catastrophe in our bodies. Given that our diets have become more monotonous, our microbiome has been impoverished to the point that this lack of diversity within our bodies may be causing some of the most common and serious health issues.

Those stories we hear from mezcaleros about their grandparents living to a hundred while still being strong and sharp may be an example of what happens when your diet includes hundreds of local crops, herbs, insects, fermented drinks, candies, and a fair share of well-crafted mezcal. Diversity not only creates a more delicious world; it also seems to be linked to our personal well-being. It relates both the big and the small to the landscape and to our tummies.

Dasylirion and Agave

I am convinced that distilled Agave and Dasylirion are the most complex spirits on earth. So much so that once I even tried to bet $10,000 on this premise against someone who considered whisky to deserve such distinction.

There are many ways to defend this position, but for now, I’ll focus on the plants and their insane diversity. I’ve always thought that these plants have been able to preserve their richness because they are such loners. Unlike rice, barley, potatoes, sugarcane, or any other popular raw material used to make spirits, there are significant agave and sotol populations that have thrived with minimal or no human interaction. Agave may need a few pollinators to survive. Still, happily, bats are great at traversing long distances and surviving extreme conditions – sotoles don’t even need such pollinators because there are female and male specimens, allowing them to exist even in the most remote corners of the desert.

In my mind, agaves and sotoles may be some of the least human-influenced crops in the world. And maybe that is why their flavors are so exciting, because they are truly foreign to us. In industrial barley products, we can taste and admire human ingenuity, while in agave and sotol, we are contemplating nature’s mysteries.

Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist who studied ancient spirits, died a year ago. When the newspaper published his obituary, they made me remember that he was credited with having discovered traces of a 9,000-year-old booze. “The oldest alcoholic beverage in the world – a mix of fermented rice, honey, and hawthorn fruit, a red berry”.

That drink, and the one found in King Midas’ tomb (made with barley beer, grape wine, and honey mead), are co-ferments, mixing very different sugar sources and flavor profiles. But why were those ancient civilizations doing such complicated concoctions? Wasn’t it easier to work with just one ingredient? Was it for efficiency? Was it for flavor?

Let me come up with what I think is the most reasonable explanation, even if I do not have the proper credentials to resolve such a complicated conundrum. I think they did that because monoculture hadn’t been invented. Bayer and DuPont hadn’t created hyper-efficient fertilizers and pesticides, so you HAD to mix crops to run a feasible operation. In the traditional milpa system, you plant corn that depletes the soil of nitrogen, and on the side, you plant beans to fix nitrogen. There is balance, and such balance translates into healthy, productive soil.

So if they were mixing in the fields, I am very sure they were taking a similar approach to alcohol production. They were finding the many sources of sugar they could get their hands on, and they got really good at balancing efficiency and flavor. Bringing it back to our current time and age, if you’ve ever been in Nombre de Dios, Durango, you’ll often see a few sotoles that are being processed side by side with agaves. Producers take all the sugars the desert can give them and make the most of them.

With everything I’ve written in mind, I realized that sotol/agave ensambles are almost non-existent in today’s market. Or at least they are not labeled as such. To my point, based on what I’ve seen in Durango, I’d claim that most Cenizos we drink from that state have at least a tiny percentage of sotol in them. So naturally, I thought of Sergio Garnier, the one person I know who is based in Durango and has access to both agaves and sotoles. If you’ve been a club member for while, you may recognize his name because the first Lamparillo to ever hit the United States, through our club, was commissioned by him and produced by Gilberto Roldan (“Lamparillo, it makes you magically erotic”, are some wise words by this gentleman that will be with us for perpetuity, ha)

Since then, Sergio has doubled down on his mezcal-making project. He built a brand-new distillery on his ranch in the middle of the Mapimí desert (designed by yours truly) and has been producing mezcal for well over a year. When he had just finished construction, he asked me if I wanted to be there for the first batch, both to celebrate and to catch any potential design flaws. So I spent a few days at the vinata, tasting lamparillo ordinarios, puntas, corazones, and looking at the desert for hours. I don’t recall the exact details, but by the end of the trip, it was very obvious to us that we needed to do that agave/sotol ensamble to better describe the desert and its flavors. A way to show that the desert is a complex and rich ecosystem if managed with care and respect. In a nutshell, we wanted to know what biodiversity would taste like when distilled.

Some Last Thoughts

Finally, Sergio went ahead and produced a few liters of this sotol/lamparillo ensamble, which was technically challenging to say the least. But eventually, he solved these puzzles and sent us a sample we immediately loved.

We are proud of this release because we think that beyond being delicious it helps present a larger picture of why artisanal products matter. We know monocultures are needed in our current world. And we acknowledge their immediate value for survival, but we despise this agricultural approach when it comes to creating complex flavors and aromas.

Artisanal mezcal depends on diversity: the plant’s genetics, the many yeasts and bacteria, the tools and materials used to make them, the water’s profile, and even the different cultures that interpret this drink according to their cosmovision. So, as a conclusion, and I apologize for the strong language: f**k monoculture, and let’s aim for a more biodiverse, delicious future.

Cheers guys!

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:

• The challenges that come with cofermenting sotoles and agaves.
• The many ways in which the very extreme weather of the Mapimí desert informs the spirit.
•  More information about Sotoles and how different they are to agaves.