“A great thunderbolt struck a maguey and tore out the plant’s heart, setting it alight. Astonished, men saw an aromatic nectar appearing deep inside. They drank it with fear and reverence, accepting it as a gift from the Gods.”
— Ancient Mexican Legend
We were off to see El Mago, the Magician of tobala. Tobala is an extremely rare mescal made of wild mountain agave. El Mago is the distiller who, reputedly, makes it better than any other mezcalero in Mexico. I was after proof.
Artist and mescal impresario Ron Cooper and I had been driving all day in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico to find El Mago. Sometimes we drove on blacktop, but mostly on sketchy dirt roads through villages seemingly unchanged for a hundred years and among vistas that would have made the California Sierras look like rubble. We'd gotten stopped at roadblocks where police were searching for narco traffickers.
It was getting dark when we entered the village, a village I cannot name as a condition of Ron bringing me here. The streets were ancient cobblestone that looped like a medieval labyrinth and as the sky darkened, there wasn't a single street lamp to light the way. It was the time of day when people lounge in hammocks and chairs by their front doors. These villagers didn't seem relaxed as we drove by. We were gringos in a white Cherokee, about as inconspicuous as Mormon missionaries in Mecca. Suspicion nipped at our heels.
I wondered: Would this pilgrimage be worth it? Could El Mago’s tobala be that good?
Mezcal—the oldest spirit in North America, with the most maligned rep—is on the verge of becoming one of the hottest entrants into the world of premium liquors. Ron Cooper, owner of the Del Maguey (mah-gay) label, the first international exporter of single village mezcals, has been evangelical in promoting pura y traddicional for 16 years. His success has subsequently inspired the launch of several competitors such as Ilegal, Amantes and Las Nahautels, all available now in the U.S. In 2008 one of Coca Cola Mexico's bottling partners, Cimsa, spent about $55 million to build a mezcal plant on the Pan American Highway south of Oaxaca City. Closer to home, country singer Toby Keith introduced his own mezcal, Wild Shot, this last year for sale in his I Love This Bar and Grill chain. As one high level tequila executive recently put it: "Mezcal is the future."
None of this would have happened but for the chain-smoking madman beside me whose fast, loose handling of the Cherokee around curves where cliffs drop away a thousand feet was causing me to need a drink.
"There's evidence that distilling was known long before the Spanish arrived," Cooper lectures me while speeding toward the village of Chichicapa. "The Chinese may have introduced it when they visited in 1421, or the indigenous may have known about it for hundreds of years before. Mezcal was produced locally in virtually every village.”
Cooper seems an unlikely candidate for the role of mezcal messiah. Now based out of Taos, New Mexico, he’s a California-born artist who shot to fame in the 1960s along with friends Ed Ruscha, Laddie Dill, Chuck Arnoldi and Dennis Hopper. His work hangs in the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art. Among his adventures when he was a young art god was a 1970 road trip in a VW van to Panama. He stopped in Oaxaca and was transfixed.
In 1986, on another Oaxaca visit, he had his 'aha!' moment. He was driving in the countryside looking for pulque, a fermented drink made from agave, when he was stopped at a police roadblock. "A soldier asked where we were going and I told him," he recalls. "He asked if I liked mezcal and said his uncle made great stuff. The next day at the checkpoint he brought me a liter. It was amazing. I realized what real mezcal was like."
In Chichicapa, we pulled up in front of a bamboo fence along a place named Camino Real. This was the palenque of Faustino Garcia Vasquez, the first distiller signed by Cooper to the nascent Del Maguey label. We entered the compound and found Vasquez and his family at lunch. We were seated on stumps and given bowls of soup and cups of coke. Vasquez, a man of few words, nodded and smiled. I felt I'd known him for years.
With lunch finished Vasquez gave a tour of his distillery. To make mezcal, a large, round rock-lined pit is filled with logs and set afire. More rocks are thrown in to absorb the heat. The pit is filled with trimmed root bulbs, or pinas, from the agave plants. Then the pinas are covered with fiber mats and earth—clambake style—and left to roast from three days to a month, depending on the maker’s taste.
When the pinas are removed, they are hacked into smaller pieces and placed in the center of a molino. This is a concrete circle where the roasted pinas are mashed by a millstone pulled by a horse or burro. The mash is then pitch forked into a six-foot high, oak vat, where fermentation takes place.
The fermentation can take from five days in summer to 30 days in winter. Once done, Vasquez removes about 300-350 liters and places it in the pot still. This still is probably identical to the stills the Spanish introduced 500 years ago. Under the pot is an oven where a fire is lit. The mash boils and steam escapes through a tube. The tube goes from the hot pot through a big water tank, constantly refreshed with cool water. The cooling water causes the steam in the tube to turn to condensation that then trickles out a faucet into a jerry can. Bingo: distillation.
One of the great pleasures of having this process explained was continually dipping my finger into the trickle of mezcal and sucking on it. The taste was smoky, slightly sweet and with a bit of citrus. Did I mention strong? If any of us had lit a cigarette, there would have been no survivors. In the entire town.
We ventured on. It was dark when Cooper parked the Cherokee on the side of the road just outside another village that shall remain nameless. I followed him down a path as he told me about the Magician. "This guy is a treasure,” he said. “I never tell anyone his name because I don't want people fucking with him. He's a genius. He doesn't make very much mezcal.”
The genius's lot was surrounded by buildings and over grown with weeds. It looked like a place squatters lived in. After fifty yards, the palenque came in to view. It was squalid and forlorn.
Suddenly, there was a shout from the hillside above us. I feared the worst. Blam! Goodbye gringo trespassers. Instead, we saw a slight man with a huge dripping moustache. He was the epitome of the Mexican peasant with his old stained trousers and battered fedora.
This was El Mago? The maestro of tobala? He was the most unprepossessing man I'd ever seen.
Cooper introduced us and we shook hands in the Indian manner, a light touch of the palms and fingers. That's when I saw his eyes. They were sly and mischievous. I put aside my superficial judgment. There was something going on behind that shy smile.
We got in the car and drove back into the labyrinth. We pulled alongside a small house that was unlocked and seemingly deserted, following El Mago down an unlit hallway at the end of which was a shrine to Our lady of Jaculla. The Indians of Oaxaca have an intense reverence for her. El Mago and Cooper both paused at the shrine, said a prayer and crossed themselves. We entered a small, dark room to the left, where El Mago turned on a dim bulb dangling from the ceiling.
There was nothing in the room except a chair and a large plastic drum. El Mago drew off some tobala from the drum into a traditional drinking bowl. We passed the bowl, saying the traditional Zapotec drinking phrase, stigibeu, which means, "To your health, the health of your friends and the health of the planet".
It was unlike any mezcal I'd ever had. There was the same sharp taste and smokiness as any joven. But there was something more, something mineral and earthy. Despite having just been made, it tasted mature, as if it had already aged and mellowed. I had a body high, like a very light psychedelic mushroom buzz. I felt lifted off the ground just a millimeter or two.
Ron was right. It was worth a dozen trips across these mountains to meet El Mago and taste his tobala. Mezcal will be found more and more in the States. But to taste a true treasure like this one will require a pilgrimage. But for whom? The masses will never find El Mago. Certainly not from me.
Mezcal Cocktails
Oaxacan Weekender
Into a cocktail shaker filled with crushed ice, pour
6 ounces of mezcal, preferably joven, 100% espadin, such as Banhez
2 ounces Aperol
1 ounce sweet vermouth
