Understanding mezcal
Dozens of agave species, nine states, and a category structure built around how much machinery touched the spirit. Mezcal rewards reading the back label more than any other distillate.
Three classes, defined by method
Tequila sorts itself by time in barrel. Mezcal sorts itself by process, which is a far more revealing axis. The Consejo Regulador del Mezcal recognises three classes, and the differences between them are physical rather than cosmetic.
| Class | What is permitted |
|---|---|
| Mezcal | The widest allowance. Industrial cooking, mechanical milling and column distillation are all available to the producer. |
| Mezcal Artesanal | Agave roasted in an earthen pit or masonry oven, milled by tahona, mallet or mechanical shredder, fermented with fibre present, distilled in copper or clay over direct fire. |
| Mezcal Ancestral | The narrowest. Pit roasting, no industrial milling, fibre included in fermentation, and distillation in clay pots over fire. No copper still. |
Clay distillation is not a marketing flourish. Clay is porous and holds heat differently to copper, and the resulting spirit tends to be softer, more mineral and less bright. Producers making ancestral mezcal are working at a scale that makes almost no commercial sense, which is reflected in what the bottle costs.
The species do the talking
Espadín accounts for most mezcal on shelves. It grows in seven or eight years and can be cultivated from offshoots, which makes it the only agave that supports steady production. Everything else is a different proposition.
- Espadín — the workhorse. Clean cooked-agave sweetness, moderate smoke, a reliable point of reference for everything else.
- Tobalá — small, grows in shade among rocks, resists cultivation. Floral and delicate in a way that surprises people expecting smoke.
- Tepeztate — twenty-five years or more to maturity. Intensely herbal, green, almost medicinal. Divisive and rarely forgotten.
- Arroqueño — large and slow. Deep, earthy, often described as chocolate-adjacent.
- Madrecuishe — grows on a tall woody trunk. Dry, mineral, faintly saline.
- Jabalí — notoriously difficult to distill because it foams violently. Distillers make it anyway, which tells you something.
Most wild species cannot be farmed at scale. Harvesting them removes the plant before it flowers, so overharvesting is a genuine pressure on wild populations, not a talking point.
Smoke is the first thing most people notice in mezcal and the least interesting thing about it.
Reading the back label
A good mezcal label is closer to a technical document than a brand statement. Look for the agave species, the state and village, the name of the maestro mezcalero, the batch size and the bottling strength.
Strength matters more here than in most categories. Traditional mezcal is often bottled at natural distillation strength, which can land anywhere from forty-five to over fifty-five percent. Diluting to a round forty percent is a commercial decision, and it costs the spirit texture.
A bottle that lists a village, a producer and a species is telling you it can be traced. A bottle that lists none of those is telling you something too.
On the word mezcal: historically it described any agave distillate, tequila included. The modern denomination is a legal boundary drawn in the twentieth century, not an ancient distinction. Plenty of traditional agave spirits fall outside it and are sold under other names, including raicilla, bacanora and destilado de agave.