The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (4 page)

Mezcal at its best is a fine, handcrafted spirit, made in very small batches in Mexican villages using ancient techniques and a wide variety of wild agaves. The
piñas
are still chopped and roasted slowly in belowground ovens, where they are infused with the smoke from local oak, mesquite, or other wood for several days. They are then crushed by a stone wheel called a
tahona.
The wheel rolls around a circular pit, propelled in the old days by a donkey, although more sophisticated machinery is sometimes used today. (This wheel, by the way, is strikingly similar to apple-grinding stones once used to make cider in Europe. Whether the Spanish introduced the
tahona
to Mexico is a subject of hot debate among archeologists and historians.)

Once the roasted
piñas
are crushed, the juice can be siphoned off and fermented with water and wild yeast for a lighter-tasting mezcal, or the whole mash, including the crushed bits of agave, can be fermented, yielding a rich and smoky mezcal that would please any Scotch drinker. In some villages, the distillation takes place in a traditional clay and bamboo still. Other distillers use a slightly more modern copper pot still that is very similar to those used to make fine whiskies and brandies. Many mezcals are double-or triple-distilled to perfect the flavor.

Some distillers are so particular about their process that they won't let visitors near the still if they've used any perfumed soaps, fearing that even a few fragrance molecules will taint their product. The better mezcals are labeled by the species of agave and village, the way a good French wine would be. Today, according to Mexico's laws, a spirit carrying the name mezcal can only be made in Oaxaca and the adjacent state of Guerrero, and in three states to the north, Durango, San Luis Potosí, and Zacatecas.

There is one ingredient that can make mezcal different from whiskey or brandy: a dead chicken.
Pechuga
is a particularly rare and wonderful version of mezcal that includes wild local fruit added to the distillation for just a hint of sweetness, and a whole raw chicken breast, skinned and washed, hung in the still as the vapors pass over it. The chicken is supposed to balance the sweetness of the fruit. Whatever its purpose, it works: do not pass up an opportunity to taste
pechuga mezcal.

What makes tequila different? For centuries, the term
mezcal
applied generally to all Mexican spirits made from the roasted heart of the agave. In the nineteenth century,
tequila
simply applied to mezcal made in or around the city of Tequila, in the state of Jalisco. It might have been made with a different species of agave, but the method was generally the same.

During the twentieth century, tequila settled into the drink it is today: a spirit made only in a designated area around Jalisco, from a cultivar of
Agave tequilana
called ‘Weber Blue', often farmed in large fields rather than wild-harvested, and heated and steamed in an oven rather than slowly roasted in an underground pit. (Twenty-ton autoclaves are not an uncommon sight at tequila distilleries today.) Unfortunately, the definition of
tequila
also expanded to include
mixtos,
tequilas distilled from a mixture of agave and other sugars, with as much as 49 percent of the fermentation coming from non-agave sugar. Most tequilas Americans slurp down in the form of margaritas are
mixtos;
it still takes a little extra effort to order a 100% agave tequila. When you do, they are well worth sampling. Some are as sweet as an aged rum or as smoky and woodsy as a good whiskey, and some have unexpected floral notes, like a French liqueur. They are perfect on their own; there's no need to pollute a fine, handcrafted tequila with lime juice and salt.

Now that mezcal and tequila have their own appellation (called a DO, or Denominación de Origen in Mexico), other agave-based spirits are claiming their territory.
Raicilla
comes from the area around Puerto Vallarta,
bacanora
from Sonora, and sotol, made from the related desert spoon or sotol plant
Dasylirion wheeleri,
from Chihuahua.

As these spirits become more popular, a new problem arises for Mexican distillers: protection of the plants and the land. Many of the non-tequila spirits are made from wild agaves. Some distillers of these spirits see the population of wild plants as being nearly unlimited and impossible to decimate; unfortunately, this is the same belief system that led to the destruction of the coast redwoods and other wild plant populations. Although some agaves reproduce vegetatively, producing “pups,” offshoots that can regrow after harvest, the harvest process prevents them from blooming. By not allowing the plants to flower, reproduce, and set seed, the genetic diversity is seriously impacted. Even the population of wild bats that pollinate agaves are diminished because the agaves are not allowed to bloom naturally.

The situation is worse for tequila, which generally comes from plants that have been farmed rather than harvested in the wild. Since only one species,
A. tequilana,
can be used to make the spirit, it has become a monoculture just as grapes have in northern California. David Suro-Piñera, owner of Siembra Azul tequila and an advocate for the preservation of tequila's history and the sustainability of the industry, said, “We've been abusing the species. We have not allowed the plant to reproduce in the wild. Genetically, it is exhausted and very vulnerable to disease. I'm very concerned.” He
attributes an increased use of pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides to the weakness of the plants themselves. Also, water is an important ingredient in tequila and other spirits; increased chemical use and degradation of the soil can pollute water supplies as well.

Already plagues of disease have devastated the domesticated agave crop, not unlike the catastrophic Irish potato famine or the wave of phylloxera that destroyed European vineyards. In the case of the agave, the agave snout weevil (
Scyphophorus acupunctatus
) introduces bacteria and deposits eggs that hatch into tiny larvae that eat the plant, rotting it from the inside out. Because the weevil bores inside, insecticides are largely ineffective.

Strengthening the crops and preserving wild agaves will require a combination of intercropping—the practice of interspersing agaves with other plants—protecting wild areas to increase genetic diversity, reducing chemical use, and taking steps to restore the health of the soil.