Mezcal and the Patience of Fermentation
“You plant it for your children. Every bottle of traditional mezcal is the end of a relationship that started before the drinker was born.”
Visited a palenque — a small-scale mezcal distillery — outside Miahuatlán. The maestro, Ignacio, has been making mezcal on the same land as his grandfather and his grandfather's father. The agave he uses today was planted by his father twenty years ago.
This is the thing about mezcal that the marketing version doesn't quite convey: making it is an act of faith across generations. The agave takes between ten and twenty-five years to mature. You plant it for your children. Every bottle of traditional mezcal is the end of a relationship that started before the drinker was born.
The fermentation happens in open-air wooden tinas, using wild yeasts from the local environment. This is why mezcal from different villages in the same valley tastes different — the yeast populations are different, shaped by local flora, local microclimate, the specific microbiome of each palenque. The terroir is real, and most of it is invisible.
I asked Ignacio if he thought about the people who would drink what he was making now in fifteen years. He thought about it for a while and then said: I think about my father.
I stayed for three hours and drove back to Oaxaca slowly, thinking about time.