The Business of Mezcal: Rogues and Reprobates

The mezcal industry’s upward trajectory appears unstoppable, especially given the global reach of the multi-nationals.  Over the past few years they have been buying up quality brands of ancestral and artesanal mezcal.  And so the potential is there, for industry growth.  But you know what they say about one bad apple. 

¨Heroes and Villains, Just see what you’ve done” was the refrain of the 1967 The Beach Boys song. Now while I’m neither, though some might disagree, Mexico’s burgeoning non-tequila agave distillate business contains representatives of both; too many of the latter.  But even one person is more than we want, especially since this mezcal industry’s star is still rising, and the rogues and reprobates among us can bring it to a crashing halt. 

In May, 2019, I was interviewed by a media type working on a piece about recent changes in the mezcal trade as a consequence of increased commercialization. We spoke about the extent of the likelihood for change in quality and pricing structure; the former going down, and the latter up. It would seem that every step a brand takes towards industrializing the means of production and tools of the trade in the manufacture of its mezcal inevitably reduces quality. I’ve seen it happen.  I have tasted the difference in a product distilled by a palenquero 15 years ago, and then today the purportedly same mezcal.  He yielded to pressure from the brand owner to produce more, quicker. And over the past five years I have noticed known brands reducing their ABV as a means of lowering cost, and new, start-up brands flogging their juice at 37 – 40 percent --- simply not what traditional mezcal is all about.
​
Fair enough.  We do live in a capitalist society, with “let the buyer beware.” But we also have consumer protection laws (though here in Mexico I would suggest their enforcement is questionable).  But they are not designed to address the issue about which I am writing. 
​

​As a general statement there’s nothing wrong with lowering quality and/or ABV, since you get what you pay for. That is, sometimes!  And it is the qualifier which brings me back to that interview, and a more pressing reason for this discourse. 
The interviewer began to relay a story to me, about interaction he had had with a bilingual (Spanish/English) Mexican who regularly flogs mezcal he bottles under his own label, made by traditional distillers, in the US. The carpetbagger, as I would term the interviewee, at one point began to talk about selling a bottle of mezcal for $1,000 USD, presumably premium, and 750 ml. He said something to the effect of “if a dumb American is willing to pay me a thousand dollars for a bottle of mezcal, then I’ll sell it to him.” Can you reasonably call the guy anything other than a carpetbagger, except perhaps a scoundrel?  To be clear, he wasn’t referring to a mezcal made with jabalí, aged ten years in a bourbon barrel, then marketed in a hand blown glass bottle with a hand blown glass agave inside. 
​

​In this early era of mezcal, that is, referencing its modern age which dates to no earlier than the mid 1990s, such an attitude and behavior is wrong.  It does harm to the growth of the industry. At this point in time in the meteoric upsurge in the popularity of agave distillates (aside from tequila), should we allow capitalism and  entrepreneurialism to be acceptable and just let it run rampant, or should we be doing all we can to stamp out this type of activity, and more importantly attitude?

You can take what the market will bear.  For example retailing a bottle of specialty pechuga in Washington state for $400 USD.  In that case the price eventually came down, likely because the market simply did not support that price. However the particular product did create a buzz, and still does today, so that’s fine. Charging high prices for novelty items like pechugas made with ham, iguana, deer, turkey breast, and yes rabbit, is fine; as long as they are truly unique and exceptional to the palate of the purchase; and the brand owner’s motivation is not simply getting as much as he can for the product. (As an aside, in my humble opinion the protein is quite often used not for imparting a particular aroma, taste and texture, but rather utilized for marketing purposes. If you distil with a chicken breast and a dozen different fruits, spices and herbs, how much is the meat relative to the other ingredients altering the end product?)
​
There is a good chance that the spirits aficionado who buys a $1000 USD bottle of mezcal, will go back to his Talisker 57 or Lagavulin 16 year old single malt scotch, and be done with mezcal. And that’s something we simply don’t want. You can stick it to him once, but no more. We want to continue to grow the mezcal market with at least some semblance of fair trade, for the benefit of us all; at least most of us. Shame on Sr. X … and every person in the mezcal industry anything like him.  As Lynyrd Skynyrd sang, “does your conscience bother you?”