Agave 101

What is mezcal?

Mezcal is a spirit distilled from the heart of the agave, the piña. The hearts are roasted, often in earthen pits lined with hot stones and wood, which is where mezcal gets its signature smoke. They're then crushed, fermented, and distilled.

Unlike most spirits, mezcal can be made from dozens of agave species. Espadín is the most common. Wild agaves like Tobalá, Tepeztate, and Jabalí take decades to mature and are far rarer, which is why a bottle can taste like a place and a lifetime.

Mezcal vs. tequila

Tequila is mezcal's famous cousin. It can only be made from one agave, blue Weber, mostly around Jalisco, and is often produced at industrial scale. Mezcal is the wider, older world: many agaves, many regions, usually made by hand.

Where it can be called mezcal

By law, a spirit can only be called mezcal if it's made in certain certified regions of Mexico: Oaxaca (which makes about 80% of all mezcal), Guerrero, Durango, San Luis Potosí, and Zacatecas, plus parts of Michoacán, Puebla, Tamaulipas, and Guanajuato. A few more states have been added recently, not without argument.

Why some bottles say "destilado de agave"

To legally print the word mezcal, a producer must certify under a rulebook called NOM-070. Certification costs money and comes with bureaucracy and rules that don't always fit small, traditional families.

So some of the most respected makers have stepped away from the label. In 2021 the Ángeles family of Real Minero dropped the word mezcal and began calling their spirit simply agave spirit, or destilado de agave. It is not a lesser thing. Often it's the most traditional bottle on the shelf, free of a system its makers felt didn't serve them.

Ancestral, artisanal, mezcal

NOM-070 sorts mezcal into three categories by how it's made. Ancestral is the most traditional: clay-pot distillation, agave crushed by hand or by a stone tahona, nothing modern. Artisanal allows a few more tools. Mezcal (the plain category) permits industrial methods. The soul, for most of us, lives in the first two.

The whole agave family

Raicilla comes from Jalisco, bright and rebellious. Bacanora is the desert spirit of Sonora. Tuxca lives on the Colima–Jalisco line, and Comiteco from Chiapas is made from agave sap, returning from near-extinction. Sotol is the wild cousin: it's distilled not from agave but from the desert spoon (Dasylirion), and grows across Chihuahua, Durango, and even Texas.

And pechuga isn't a place, it's a celebration: any agave spirit distilled a third time with fruit, spices, and a chicken or turkey breast hung in the still, made for weddings and holidays.