Mezcal: Everything but the Worm

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I think mezcali is a drink that you had you

fell in love slowly, slowly.

And when I say fell in love, it's because a mezcal is a drink that you drink it by kissing.

A little kisses, kisses all the time.

I've been drinking a lot of mezcal over the past few years and I've never thought about kissing it.

That's a new one.

I'm still at the kiss on the lips stage.

Not even tongues.

We're still getting to know each other.

It's nearly the Day of the Dead in Mexico, and in honor of the holiday, we are taking a trip beyond our southern border to get to know Mexico's most famous drink or drinks.

And you're listening to Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And this week, Firewater from the Agave.

So Mexico's national drink is tequila.

Wait a minute, isn't it, Mescal?

Well, what's the difference?

Let's ask Sarah Bowen.

She's a professor of sociology at North Carolina State University, and she just published a new book called Divided Spirits, Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production.

Something that's really interesting since most people are more familiar in the U.S.

with tequila is that tequila really is a mezcal.

And mezcal is a word that means it's the generic term for agave distillates.

So mezcal is produced throughout Mexico, and one of the places where they started producing a lot of mezcal was in Jalisco in near Tequila, near the town of Tequila.

And eventually that town became very known for the mezcal they were producing there.

So they called it mezcal de tequila.

And around the turn of the century, into the 20th century, it really started to get known.

And so people started to drop the mezcal de and just call it tequila.

So basically tequila is a type of mezcal.

Mezcal is a generic term.

It's like saying whiskey.

You have bourbon, scotch, rye, all types of whiskey.

It's the same thing.

Mezcal is just all liquors made from agave, including tequila.

So the source of all this boozy goodness is the agave.

And contrary to what I thought, it is not a cactus.

No, in fact, my son, when he was in kindergarten, corrected his kindergarten teacher about that.

He said, Mrs.

Smith, agave's are not cacti, and neither are aloes, and agave are not aloes.

They just look like aloes, but they don't look anything at all like cacti.

They're all succulents.

They're just good at storing water in their tissue, but they're not related.

That was Gary Paul Napan.

He's an ethnobotanist at the University of Arizona and co-author of Tequila, a natural and cultural history.

You know, I've seen agave, at least on the label of agave syrup bottles, and like Gary's son says, they do sort of look like an aloe vera plant, like the spiky, bluish-green, almost a fan shape, like the plant version of a mohawk.

That's funny, I hadn't thought about it, but that is the 2D version of agave.

Actually those huge long spiky leaves I guess they fan out in a circle.

It's not a mohawk, more like a spiky, pointy pincushion with an enormous pine cone in the middle.

We have photos on our website.

And Mexicans have been using agave plants for a long time.

It's one of the oldest plants recovered with human remains in the New World.

And upwards of 8,000 years in caves in Texas and Mexico, we have agave fiber, and we can't always identify whether those agave were wild harvested or cultivated, used for fiber or used for drink, unless there was weaving with the fiber.

There's an article from 1885 in Scientific American that calls the agave the needle and thread plant.

That same century-old Scientific American article also said that the sap was highly caustic and was used to clean wounds.

Gary told us the same thing.

Also, there's several alkaloids and very caustic substances in agave that can use sort of to repel insects or other animals just because they're so caustic to the skin.

Those have actually been looked at for anti-cancer agents in the 60s and 70s.

So agave are sort of a wellspring of natural products, and we've not heard the last word on that yet.

Okay, so fabric and wound cleaners are great, but really what's awesome about agave is the sugary liquid you can get from it, and the booze.

These have been consumed for thousands of years.

One is called aguamiel.

It's a liquid that pulls up naturally when you cut part of the agave.

Then that liquid gets fermented into this very funky beverage called pulque.

The most revolting substance known to man.

Okay, I don't quite feel that way, but it is a little unusual.

Pulque is only a little alcoholic, like an old school beer.

But then Mexicans started harvesting and roasting those huge pine cone-looking things in the middle of the agave plant.

They pressed out the the liquid, fermented it, and then distilled it.

There's a bit of a debate about when distillation actually got started.

There appears to be some kinds of primitive distillation technologies that may have been used prehistorically to take the fermented juices of the roasted heads of agave, a different process than making pulque.

And so that may have been done in a few places prehistorically.

The other hypothesis is that distillation technology was introduced by Philippine or Chinese sailors who were part of the Manila galleon that were along with the Spanish, and it was first introduced for sugar cane to the west coast of Mexico and then transferred to Mezcal.

Sarah says that the first documented reference to distilled agave spirits shows up in 1619, which is obviously after Spanish colonization.

Some people think the Spanish introduced the technology.

Either way, that's when distilling really got going.

Agave is like corn and beans.

It's one of Mexico's most important crops, and it has been for millennia.

But unlike those plants, it's only sort of domesticated, and we don't really know when that happened.

You know, we have fairly good evidence of when the domestication of corn and beans

and chiltepeans, chilies began.

But it's a slippery slope with agave

because they don't have the sharp distinction in characteristics between wild and domesticated plants that annual plants do.

Gary did say that when the native peoples were asked by the Spanish to draw maps of the landscape after the conquest, they drew agave that was clearly being farmed in hillside terraces.

And we can date those terraces.

And some of them go back

4,000 to 5,000 years, may even predate the introduction of corn into some places.

So we may have had agave and prickly pears being cultivated but not fully domesticated in parts of Mexico well before corn was even introduced.

Agave goes way back in Mexico, but it was the roasted agave juice that was distilled into some sort of boozy drink that was the plant's passport to make its way out of Mexico and into the U.S.

in the form of tequila.

Sarah says she's found an ad in a Los Angeles newspaper as far back as 1857 advertising Mescal de tequila.

But tequila exports didn't really take off until the invention of the margarita.

Like a lot of drinking history, the exact origins are a little bit hazy, but the leading theory is that a Tijuana restaurant came up with it in the 1930s to make the traditional tequila shot a little more ladylike.

By the traditional tequila shot, I mean the one we all did at university.

I remember that one.

Put some salt on your hand, lick the salt off, throw back the tequila, and then stick a wedge of lime in your mouth.

Fun times.

The margarita really takes off post-World War II, along with the tequila sunrise and other such classy drinks.

In fact, the frozen margarita machine was invented in 1971 in Dallas.

Thank you, Texas.

And then the government of Mexico started freaking out.

Tequila was getting more popular, so other countries started selling tequila.

I think in Spain there were some distilleries and in South Africa who were marketing what they were making as tequila.

Something needed to be done.

And so the Mexican government turned to a legal tool that was invented in Europe for things like Roquefort cheese and champagne, the DO, or denomination of origin.

So as far as I know, Tequila is the first DO outside of Europe to be protected, and it's certainly the best known.

The DO sets up a bunch of rules and regulations about what you can call something.

The DO for champagne says that it has to come from a particular region made from particular grapes in a particular way.

And in 1974, Mexico said the same thing would now be true for tequila.

Remember that tequila is from tequila.

It's a town in the state of Jalisco.

In the DO, they restricted tequila production to five states, Jalisco and three nearby, and then they added a controversial one on the other side of the country.

Ever since it got really popular, tequila sort of went its own way from the rest of Mezcal.

And the denomination of origin basically speeded that evolution up.

The goal was to protect Mexico's right to make tequila.

And that is really how it was intended and how it has evolved over time.

And in that way, it's been very successful.

I think in terms of the market market for Tequila has grown, especially since the mid-90s.

And, you know, they've really marketed and protected Mexico's association with tequila.

So in all of those ways, I think they have done what they intended.

In terms of actually contributing to local development and, you know, Mexican workers and small producers, I think that they have not succeeded in that way.

So on the one hand, it's been a good thing.

There's really been a tequila boom.

That sounds like a drink.

Well,

however, we're drinking it, we're drinking more more of it.

Sarah said that between 1995 and 2008, so that's just 13 years, tequila production tripled.

But this new tequila is different from the old tequila.

And in a strange way, it's not just because of the market, it's also because of the rules that were set up to protect tequila.

I think that what is significant about the quality standard for tequila is that it's both too open and too restrictive.

One example of how the Dio got too restrictive is that tequila used to be made from four different species of agave.

But in 1974, the Dio passed, and suddenly tequila could only be made from one species, the blue agave.

The rationale was that that's what people wanted.

But Gary disagrees.

It would be like saying all American hamburger eaters only want Angus beef.

But they were eating a variety of cattle breeds before Angus was so highly commercialized.

But now every restaurant thinks that if they're not serving Angus beef or wagu from Japan, that they're serving inferior beef.

It's not inferior.

It's like different kinds of apples have different flavors.

Different kinds of agabis have different flavors.

And those flavors were craftily blended together by tequila makers for decades.

That's what Sarah meant when she said the Dio was too restrictive.

So why is it also too open?

Well, that's because it doesn't say anything about how you make the tequila.

It's just the type of agave, where it's grown, and the chemical properties.

Although it says a lot about the parameters of the final product in terms of

the acidity or the alcohol content, it says almost nothing about the practices.

What kind of stills or how is the agave grown or how do you know if the agave is mature.

And because it says very little about that, that means that basically it's shifting to an ever more industrial model because that is more competitive, more cost-effective.

They can get better economies of scale.

For instance, instead of roasting the agave in the ground, which gives it that characteristic, smoky, earthy taste, most tequila producers now cook it in a stainless steel autoclave.

And there are plenty more industrial shortcuts like that.

Some producers, particularly the smaller guys, they've tried to keep traditional methods going.

But industrial production is cheaper.

And speaking out against the DO and these new techniques can be a dangerous business.

Sarah kept her sources anonymous in the book.

Mezcal and tequila are very controversial.

And so, you know, someone was shot, the owner of a distillery, the the distillery, Samatias, was shot in front of his distillery in 1997.

They never solved that mystery, but some people believed that it was because he was speaking out a lot at that time about one of the rules.

And another person that I interviewed said, you know, that he

sometimes felt nervous and tried not to talk about his trips in advance.

He would post about them

after he was back home.

There's another problem with the tequila boom in Jalisco.

All these fields and fields of blue agave, they are all clones.

The remarkable thing is when an agave plant in a field flowers, hundreds of other flowers on other plants bloom at the same time.

That must be both completely freaky and absolutely stunning.

What that means is that there's no genetic diversity or genetic resistance in one plant versus its neighbor plant.

And so if a disease comes along, the entire field doesn't have tolerance or resistance to that virus or bacteria, the whole field goes down at once.

So the old timers, the first mescaleros that I knew, never planted just one species of agave or one variety.

They alternated rows of different species, some of which had resistance to one virus, others to a bacteria, others to some insect pest or to heat or drought.

But now they can only plant one species, the blue agave.

So that's what they do.

And they don't even wait for the plant to propagate naturally.

Gary told us they take a fingernail-sized clipping from one plant and just grow 100,000 new plants from it in the lab.

As Gary said, this cloned field of plants is super vulnerable to disease.

Entire landscapes can be wiped out.

And that has actually happened a number of times.

What makes it even worse is that agave isn't like corn or wheat.

You can harvest and replant those crops every year, but it takes at least six to eight years to grow a new agave plant up to the point you can harvest it.

The latest agave plague was about a decade ago in the early 2000s.

And it was a really severe shortage.

I think the population of agave and Jalisco dropped by 50%

from one year to the next, and the price

went up 16 or 17 fold in that same period.

And so the tequila companies, the small ones were going out of business because they didn't have any agave.

The big ones were even having to, like Cuervo and Salso, had to shut down down one of their factories for periods of time and cut their production.

There were articles in the U.S.

about the tequila crisis.

Farmers are in an incredibly tough situation.

Like we said, it takes at least six to eight years to grow a crop, but you could lose that entire crop, or the companies could decide not to buy it.

It's a really big bet for a farmer, and when it doesn't work out, they're screwed.

And the landscape's being screwed too, because to try to keep all those clones alive, they have to use a lot of pesticides.

There's a recent Mother Jones article by Ted Genoese that tells the story of one agave farmer who is bucking that chemical-saturated trend and how some tequila companies are now introducing organic lines.

We'll link to the story online.

Okay, so tequila has become an industrial product, it's lost a lot of its original variety, and along with that, it's lost a lot of its cool factor with chefs and drinkers.

But there's a new agave drink in town.

Well, actually, it's kind of an old one.

As we said earlier, Mezcal is really tequila's extended family, but it is pretty amazing stuff, and it is super hot right now.

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I'm Ruth Reischel, and I know zero about Mescal.

Yes, that's right.

That's me taping in a restaurant in Mexico City, just hanging with Ruth Reischel and drinking Mescal.

I am so jealous of this recent trip to Mexico for so many reasons, and that experience is just one of them.

Though you will get to hear me visit Mexico later in the episode.

No, Ruth, though.

Sorry, dude.

Well.

So, Ruth is not a Mezcal fan, as it happens.

But I was at this food conference hanging out with chefs and food people from all over Mexico, and they could not stop telling me how much they love mezcal and how much better it is than tequila.

Enrique Albera.

Okay, tell me what you think of when you think of mezcal.

I think of the hug from my mother.

Why?

Because it's it's powerful and warm.

Which do you prefer, mezcal or tequila?

Mezcal all the time.

Why?

I just think it's a better representation of the terroir.

It's a much more diverse product.

Tequila, it's a little bit monochromatic.

I'm not saying it's always like that, but in general, mezcal

has a greater variety and more possibilities, and I like diversity.

Benito Molina?

I'm a Mexican cook.

I have a restaurant in Encenado Baja, California California called Manzanilla.

We opened 15 years ago.

Oh, I love mezcal.

When we open the restaurant, it's saying the door, fine wine, live abulone, rare mezcal.

That's what it's saying in the door.

Mezcal is very traditional, and the process has been kept very traditional.

Tequila is a mezcal, but it's the most famous of the mezcales.

And tequila is made in a very industrialized way.

It's now done in these alto shams, no fire really actually touching the heart of the magué.

And mezcal is the opposite, completely.

Mezcal is still handmade, real fire, you can taste the smoke.

It's more artisanal, and in my opinion, much better.

I prefer mezcal a thousand times over tequila.

I'm Jose Castillo, I'm an architect in Mexico City.

Do you drink mezcal?

As much as possible.

I actually have to say that

in the bottom drawer in my office, I have at least four bottles of mezcal.

And it's actually actually like the perfect break the ice drink so I have to say that it's

in that sense is the equivalent of what a Canadian club was for a John Draper in the 60s well I like to think that we've substituted Canadian club for mezcal nowadays in Mexico City

my name Wiley Dufrane I don't have a lot of mezcal experience.

I have not logged a lot of mezcal miles.

But I like mezcal.

We used to use it a fair amount in cocktails at Alder, and I enjoyed in a cocktail.

Ever cooked with it?

Yes.

We used to marinate foie gras with a mezcal that had some honey in it, I believe.

If it didn't have honey, it had some sweet notes.

But we used to marinate foie gras in it and make

terrine, foie gras tureen, for a dish that we used to do called foacamole.

I think the idea of foacamole guacamole is hysterical.

Plus, just to reiterate, I'm a little starstruck listening to all these chefs.

Fortunately, because I never leave the house and I don't eat at fancy restaurants, I didn't really know who most of them were.

It's so not true.

I've eaten with you, but yes, I do know a little more about famous Mexican chefs.

In any case, mezcal is the drink of choice in DeFe these days, and poor old tequila is totally passe.

But one of the chefs, Benito Molina, told me that the reputation of mezcal was really different until quite recently.

Yeah, when I was a little kid, mezcal was looked down as if you smoke marijuana, basically.

I mean, it's like, I mean, only the construction workers drink that or smoke that, and it's like

it had this like

economic down, like down looking down, that mezcal was this like lower

thing, which is very stupid in my opinion.

Part of this is because mezcal was actually an underground drink.

It was illegal.

It's a strange holdover from the late 1800s and the Spanish Empire's desire to corner the Mexican market with their own European alcohol.

Because Mezcal was illegal in a lot of places, it stayed clandestine.

People producing it mostly for themselves, for their families, maybe for local festivals, or to sell, but on local markets.

And so, because of that, it kind of retained this local character because it was mostly being made and sold in these particular regions.

It didn't have the fame of tequila, and so it retained this local character.

Because it stayed small and local, Mescal stayed varied.

It can be made from up to 42 different types of both cultivated and wild agave and grown in all sorts of ecosystems.

And it's produced using a variety of traditional methods.

So the flavors of Mescal have stayed incredibly different from one type of agave to another, from one producer to another.

It's like how single malts from different producers can taste incredibly different.

That huge variety of flavors has actually been verified by science.

We spoke to Antonio de Leon Rodriguez, a molecular biologist based in San Luis, Potosi.

That's a mezcal-producing state a little bit north of Mexico City.

Antonio separated out all the volatile compounds that make up the flavor of his local mezcales.

First of all, we found a lot of alcohol compounds similar to those in tequila.

Also, we found a lot of compounds called esters that have scents and flavors like flowers and fruit.

And many of these were only found in Mezcal, mezcalo, not in tequila.

There's a great diversity of compounds.

We found more than 150 volatile compounds that have very particular scents, like grass or recently cut flowers and other aromas like fruit and wood.

They're not added, but they're produced by fermentation, and they also come from the plants themselves.

All of that adds up to some really crazy flavors.

I went to a mezcal bar in Oaxaca where they sell mezcal straight from dozens of small producers.

They love nothing more than to geek out about all the different varieties.

I asked Marco Ochoa, he's one of the owners of Mescaloteca.

I asked him what he tasted when he tasted Mescal.

He told me he got flavors of herbs, flowers, dairy, minerals, resins, cheese, earth, smoke.

Marco likes to say that mescal is more varied than wine, though of course I can't verify that no matter how much I tried.

That night I had one that tasted like grass and another one like peanuts.

All those flavors came from different species of agave and the ecosystems and the production methods, nothing nothing else.

And it's precisely this variety and the authenticity and the tradition that makes mezcal so popular right now.

Jose Castillo, the man who keeps four bottles of mezcal in his office desk drawer, he summed it up.

I would say that mezcal suddenly coincided with

a moment of nuances and differences appreciated more than standards and similarities.

And I think that's crucial for not only drinks, but also gastronomy.

Everything seems great in Mezcal world, right?

It's authentic and traditional, but it's having a moment and finding new markets.

It's great.

But there's a threat on the horizon.

And once again, it's the very thing that is supposed to protect it, our old friend the Dio.

Mexico introduced a new denomination of origin for mezcal in 1994.

They basically copied the tequila one.

It's a little different.

Seven states are allowed to produce mezcal.

It lists five species of agave that mezcal producers are allowed to use, with some flexibility for others.

But here's the thing.

At least 24 of Mexico's states have a long history of making mezcal, and like we said, it can be made from dozens of different species of agave.

So, I think there is a lot of controversy.

It's a hard thing, though, and that I think is related to the fact that it's just absurd, basically, to have one denomination of origin and try to have one for mezcal, which is something that's so diverse and produced in so many places.

Again, it's like creating one DO for all of French wine.

But there's a bigger problem, and it has to do with the whole idea of a DO and who's in charge of deciding the rules.

On the international level, the DO means it's unique, exclusive.

But at the same time, the DOs have another interpretation.

It's privatizing knowledge.

Not against the DO,

but yes, the DO in an academic sense can turn into a form of dispossession.

Someone takes away something that's yours.

Because the small-scale producer is the one who has all the knowledge.

The way the DO is

at least in Mexico,

the producer isn't in charge of the denomination.

It's the state.

So the rulemaking comes from the state, and the state is the one who sets the taxes, the rules of the game, and who

can't participate.

That was Graciela Carreño.

She's a small-scale mezcal producer.

I visited her and her family's palenque.

That's the Spanish word for the mezcal equivalent of a winery.

Hers is outside Oaxaca.

We're going to hear more from her about what it's like to make mezcal today.

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And now, back to mezcal.

Nikki, I tasted 17 different mezcals in one week in Oaxaca.

You say I'm the drinker.

I know what that sounds like, but they were small sips.

But mezcal feels almost like the lifeblood of Oaxaca.

It's a big,

a very important part of our gastronomy in Oaxaca.

If you go to Oaxaca and do not drink mezcal or taste mezcal, it's like if you have never have gone there.

That's Alejandro Ruiz, the man who kisses his mezcal.

He grew up in Oaxaca and now he runs three restaurants there.

I have in fact eaten in two of them and his food is ridiculously delicious.

You don't need to tell me, I ate in his Mexico City restaurant and I am still dreaming about it.

But he told me how he first tasted mezcal and what this drink means to you when you grow up in Oaxaca.

I was 12.

In my community, I was born in the countryside, in a community of 200 families.

To drink mezcal and to join with the family, it's a cultural thing.

So as parents, parents prefer to organize a party for the kids on the side or in another room or another area within the party instead of leaving them going out.

So, they rather accept that you being a teenager, they let you have a couple of shots of mezcal or a couple of beers.

This is normal, this is not something

seen culturally bad.

Graciada, she's the mezcal producer I visited in Oaxaca, she said the same thing.

People drink mezcal at almost all important events: town festivals, a birthday, when a baby is born, when someone dies, when a couple gets married.

It's very important in rituals,

for example.

One of the gifts that a man brings when he asks for the hand of a woman is mezcal.

It's one of the most valuable things, together with bread, chocolate, meat, flowers, candles, and a bottle of mezcal.

You can't skip that.

Not only for drinking,

it's also used for health and in food.

For health?

That's why we have a saying:

for everything bad, mezcal, and for everything good as well.

Graciela runs an organic mezcal company called Real Minero.

They're based in the town Santa Catarina, Minas.

Her family history in mezcal goes way back.

Her great-grandfather made mezcal in the 1800s.

My grandfather grew agave his entire life and made mezcal.

Along my father's line, his father's father and his mother's father, they were all mezcaleros.

The line of mezcaleros is very strong.

But those are all guys, and that's traditional in the world of mezcal making.

I, as a woman, feel very proud because not only were my great-grandfathers involved in mezcal, but also my great-grandmothers.

My great-grandfathers made mezcal, and my great-grandmothers sold it.

Graciela is keeping the family tradition of lady mezcaleras alive.

My father, when it comes to making decisions, he always says,

Wait until my daughter comes.

I work, but she's in charge.

That is actually incredibly unusual, even today.

Her great-grandmothers may have sold mezcal, which was unusual then, yes, but she's in charge of making it.

She told me it can be really difficult to convince the men she works with to take her orders, even though her father has handed down the business to her.

It's sometimes a little frustrating.

My father says, why weren't you born a man?

Look,

everyone who works in mezcal is male.

They're not used to seeing women, much less women giving orders.

And it's tough work.

It's very physical.

I'm not going to haul a huge agave, but I have to at least carry a small one in the field.

They have to see that it doesn't scare me.

So now we just came from carrying in the trunks of the agave.

I can't lift them, but I have to try.

I know it'll hurt me, but they have to see me trying.

Because for me to come and tell them what to do, to be strict, it's a tough process.

It's been very difficult for them because I make rules for them

and they weren't used to it.

I walked around with her and got a tour of the palenque.

They had just finished roasting a few tons of agave hearts, and one of her workers chopped off a piece for me.

The flesh was a dark, burnt golden orange.

Wow.

I chewed at the plant flesh and sucked out the sweetness.

It was like chewing on sugar cane.

It was sweet and smoky, like a delicious burnt caramel.

I also got to see the fermentation bats and the distillation room.

Like we said, for a long time, Mezcal was illegal.

So Graciela's family were basically moonshiners.

I was born in 1978.

Two years later, the law disappeared and Mezcal was legal.

But it's like a never-ending story.

Once the law was over, 1980, 1994, the government created the DO.

And the producers barely had any time to breathe.

Had barely begun making mezcal legally, and then the DO rules came in, and the producers had to certify mezcal.

And the denomination of origin stuff made life really hard for small producers for lots of reasons.

They basically don't know how to read and write.

The lack of schooling, it's a limitation for the producer.

Because to be certified, you have to be registered.

They don't have the academic preparation to do that.

There's another fundamental fact.

They don't have much money, and it costs money to be certified.

Instead, third-party bottlers come in and they pay the mezcal makers an absurdly low price, and they're the ones who make the money.

And just like tequila, there are rules in the mezcal deo that favor industrialization.

This whole issue is really important because just like there was a tequila boom, now there's the beginning of a mezcal boom.

According to Sarah Bowen, between 2005 and 2014, production of certified mezcal increased from about 400,000 liters to almost 1.5 million.

That's a four-fold increase, practically, in just nine years.

The question is, who is going to benefit?

Today, some of that money is reaching small-scale producers.

Some of the younger generation can work in their villages instead of migrating.

For Graciela, it certainly worked out.

When she was in school and her family started the business, they were recycling old glass bottles and printing handwritten labels that they taped on.

Now she sells mezcal all over Mexico and in four states in the U.S.

She's unusual.

Most mezcaleros don't have a university degree, but it's still not an easy business.

It's my project for life.

Many years ago, I thought,

what else can I do in my life?

I couldn't find anything else.

It's not that I'm ignorant or I can't do anything else, it's that I can find anything that fulfills my life as much as the world of mezcal.

I think the hardest thing in life is to find the thing, the work that wakes you up, or where you always find new things to do.

I've only found that in Mezcal.

But the question remains: will this boom and the whole Dio business will end up harming small producers like Graciela and making the whole industry much more corporate and homogenous?

Jose Castillo, the Mezcal drinking architect, told me that he worries about this.

I think there's always a danger that thinking that mezcal will become like tequila in that sense of losing its nuances and differences and becoming just one big industrialized drink.

And the other big worry with this boom is about the agave itself.

Remember how long an agave takes to grow?

Six to eight years for a blue agave, even longer for the others?

I spoke to Mexican chef Enrique Alvera.

He just opened his first restaurant in New York, and mezcal is on the menu.

What if this increased demand, especially in the U.S., what if it leads to over harvesting?

No, I think New Yorkers are pretty much into mezcala.

Unfortunately there's still uh just a few brands that are making it to the market but little by little I think we'll start to become uh more popular.

Oh and that is not necessarily a good thing because it's uh mezcal is very artisanal and you don't want to deplete all the agabes

uh because of market uh pressure.

Right, so if all the Americans start drinking it too, there won't be enough left?

Exactly.

And those are wild agabes and they take a long time to grow.

So you need to really be careful on how much you take away from the land because it cannot be cultivated yet.

And it takes sometimes 20-30 years to get the agave to maturity.

So we should be careful.

Sarah says that at least when it comes to the whole DO issue, it does look like American drinkers might actually be helping.

A few years ago, there were proposed changes to the DO that would have favored big industry even more.

Based on her years of studying what happened with tequila, Sarah thought the changes would definitely go through.

And there was this huge wave of protest, largely from the U.S., also working with a lot of people in Mexico, and it failed.

And this is one of the first times, as I have traced, you know, the evolution of the standards for tequila and mezcal that the interests of someone other than the really big tequila and mezcal companies have won out.

Graciela is hopeful too.

I hope that there are responsible consumers.

I hope that mezcal doesn't remain just a fashion, because fashion is ephemeral, and mezcal isn't ephemeral, not at all.

This is a drink that has made it through all its difficulties.

It's always lived in the shade.

It's always been underneath something, not the state, then it's a political and economic situation.

or the denomination of origin.

There's always been something threatening it.

But Mezcal has survived.

It's the moment to give it its place.

It's never been a fashionable drink.

It'll never be a fashionable drink because we don't make it just for fashion.

I started this episode knowing zero about Mezcal.

Me and Ruth Reichel both.

And now I'm intrigued.

Maybe it's time for us to make out again.

So that's a win, but actually, Cynthia, we have totally failed, at least in one regard.

Because the most important question when it comes to mezcal, as everybody knows, is what's up with the worm?

The worm.

Yes, let me tell you a little bit about that pickled creature at the bottom of some bottles.

It's not actually a worm.

It's a larva that grows on the agave plant.

And in Oaxaca, people usually don't stick it in a bottle of mezcal.

That's some weird marketing gimmick.

They usually grind it up with salt and have it on the side.

Or why don't you take the advice of a Oaxaca chef?

A worm, I'd rather eat it in a taco with a good salsa and a good guacamole.

But, but, but.

The worm does make a difference.

It's not a worm, even though, yes, in Mexico, it is also called a worm.

My point is, the worm larva thing does make a difference to the taste.

Our friend the mezcal scientist, Antonio de Leon Rodriguez, said so.

We identified the volatile compounds that are imparted to the mezcal from the worm when it's inside the bottle.

It's actually a butterfly larva.

It's not a worm.

It's a larva.

And when it's in contact with the alcohol, there are proteins, hormones, fats, and some of those are pheromones.

After all, it's an organism that's developed,

so it has a great amount of nutrients.

There are fats that are released that can give a heavier or lighter flavor depending on the quantity of worms in the bottle.

According to Antonio, some of these flavorful compounds only show up when there's a worm in the bottle.

He mentioned one that I know and love.

It's called cis-3-hexanol, and it is exactly the smell of freshly cut grass.

I personally will still buy bottles without the worm.

I think it's weird.

And the best mezcals don't have it.

If you, dear listeners, are also ready to take your relationship with mezcal to the next level, here's what our experts advise.

For drinking mezcal or tequila, I think the most important thing is that it says 100% agave.

So that's the starting point.

Then in terms of mezcal, I think it is interesting to try to try mezcals that have different varieties of agave.

Try to sort of compare that.

And also also

try mezcals that have the same variety of agave, but maybe that are made with different methods.

So, one that's made with a clay pot still and one that's made with a copper still.

Personally, I prefer the white mezcal because it has a cleaner flavor.

It tastes like

while the others, the aged ones, they get all those flavors from the wood.

I said, but I repeat: the good drinks drink straight.

Tequila Mezcal, this a good drink,

straight.

Without lemon, without a salt, always straight.

And don't forget, you're kissing it.

Just FYI, crappy, cheap mezcal will probably have a fake, harsh, smoky flavor that tastes like a campfire.

But the good stuff, you can increasingly find 100% clear young mezcal in great liquor stores and bars across the U.S.

and even in Europe.

Let us know what you think of mezcal.

And salud.

We could not have made this episode without lots of help from Sarah Bowen, author of the new book, Divided Spirits, Tequila, Mescal, and the Politics of Production.

We have a link to it on our website where you can also find the details of the book that Gary Paul Napan co-authored.

That's called Tequila, a Natural and Cultural History.

By the way, Gary grows his own agave at his home in Arizona, and he's starting to turn them into agave syrup shrubs for cocktails.

I want to taste those gastropod trip to Arizona.

Thanks to Antonio De Leon Rodriguez, the biotechnologist from San Luis Potosi, who also studies Mescal.

Thanks to Marco Ochoa of Mescaloteca, you have to go to Mescaloteca if you visit Oaxaca.

He's also the one who introduced me to Graciela Carreño of Real Minero.

She was generous enough to share her life story and give me a tour.

Her mezcal is called Real Minero and her distributor sells it in Texas, California, Washington State, and New York.

A huge thank you also to Enrique Alvera and Sasha Correa for bringing me to Mexico City for their fabulous Miss America conference.

While I was there, I got to hang out with Alejandro Ruiz, Jose Castillo, Benito Molina, Ruth Reichel, and Wiley Dufrayne.

Thank you guys for sharing your time and your Mezcal stories with me.

Finally, huge thanks to Lucas Larsen and Gabriella Lendo for their expert voiceover work and their help with a couple of words for my Spanish interviews that I couldn't quite make out.

As always, we will be back in two weeks.

We're sticking with the liquor with an episode all about peak booze and the synthetic alcohol of the future.

Meanwhile, for a little look at the the power of Mescal, for good and for bad, let's leave the last word to Gary.

I had been doing field work in the Sierra Madre of Mexico,

and we were doing some winter field work and camping out, and we had a campfire after an all-night dance, and it was quite cold outside, so someone said, I think it's getting too cold.

Let's have some fire water.

And when the dance finally wound down, the musicians came around to the bonfire too because their fingers were cold and people were passing around a bottle of this mezcal baccanora.

And I remember distinctly that they were all wearing polyester pants, these cowboys, they weren't wearing blue jeans.

And as the night got colder and they drank more mezcal, their pants began to melt by being so close to the campfire.

So when I finally woke up in the morning, they had no pants on on from about the knees down because the polyester had melted.

So it's clear that Mascal changes your perception of the world and sometimes not for the good.

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