The Mezcal Rush. Granville Greene
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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