Category Archives: Mezcal

Banhez Ensamble

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One last mezcal to close out the month. This is an ensamble from Banhez that I purchased primarily for use in cocktails. The price is in the neighbourhood of $30 in the Twin Cities and was recommended from a number of different directions as one of the best choices in that end of the price spectrum. As it turns out, it’s also a decent sipping mezcal and so I thought I would also review it as such.

Banhez is an interesting outfit. It is a cooperative comprised of a number of families in Ejutla in Oaxaca: the U.P.A.D.E.C Cooperative. They release mezcals made from single varietals of agave and those bottles have the names of the distilling mezcaleros on them. The ensamble, however, a 90-10 blend of espadin and barril, is a collective bottling by the entire cooperative and does not bear the name of an individual mezcalero. Here are my notes on the first few pours from the bottle. Continue reading →

Cinco Sentidos, Cuishe, Tio Tello

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I guess this is a month of mezcal reviews. I kicked off the month with an excellent ensamble by Tio Rey in Oaxaca for Vago. Last week, I reviewed a cenizo made for Legendario Domingo by the Colon family in Michoacán. This week I’m back in Oaxaca. This mezcal was distilled from cuishe/cuixe, a variant of wild agave karwinskii (from which come a number of magueys used to distill mezcal). The mezcalero is Eleuterio “Tio Tello” Perez Ramos and the bottler is Cinco Sentidos, the brand from El Destilado restaurant in Oaxaca. As per the label, the production process was pretty artisanal: the maguey was roasted in conical ovens with mesquite and oak for five days, chopped by hand with machetes, and then mashed with hammers also made of mesquite. Fermentation took place in tanks made of cypress before distillation in a copper alembic still. Interestingly, the label also says that this was distilled in 2008 but only bottled in 2024. Since it’s still a joven I guess that means it spent 16 years in glass containers. I don’t know enough about mezcal to be able to say for sure but I think that’s a pretty long time compared to most. Technically, I suppose the spirit shouldn’t change in the glass but anybody who has opened bottles of whisky that were filled decades prior knows that “bottle maturation” is a thing. Anyway, having enjoyed Cinco Sentidos’ offerings before (well, their mole pechuga, a little less), I’m looking forward to this one. Let’s see what it’s like. Continue reading →

Legendario Domingo, Cenizo

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Legendario Domingo bottle mezcals made in various states of Mexico. As far as I can make out from their website, they currently have five labels, each covering batches of mezcal from a producer in a different region: Guerrero, Michoacán, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosi and Durango. This particular bottle is from the Colon family mezcalera from Nombre de Dios in Durango. It is made from a variety of maguey that I have never tried before (though that’s true of the majority of them): Cenizo; and I believe this is also the first mezcal from Durango that I have reviewed. The mode of production is quite different from that of the Vago Ensamble I reviewed last week. That one is a mezcal ancestral, the agave ground by hand and the spirit distilled in clay stills. This is a mezcal artesenal. The agave is roasted in an undeground oven but milled with an electric shredder; and the distillation happens in an alembic still. What it does have in common with Vago, however, is the general illegibility of the label. Thankfully, the labels are at least colour-coded for the different producers, so if this review inspires you to go out and look for this one, just keep an eye out for the purple label (though I’m not sure, I think each producer makes mezcal for Legendario Domingo from the same maguey each time). Okay, let’s get to it. Continue reading →

Vago Ensamble, Tio Rey

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Mezcal Vago has a colourful origin story—which you can read on their website—and bottles with colour-coded labels that are not very easy to read. The most important information comes—since, I think, their brand design a couple of years ago—from the colour of the label, which indicates which of the four Oaxacan mezcaleros they work with has produced the spirit in the bottle. The deep red label of this bottle, for instance, identifies the mezcal as the handiwork—and I do mean handiwork, as the cooked agave is mashed by hand before fermentation and distillation in barros or clay pot stills—of Salomon Rey Rodriguez, better known as Tio Rey. The broad strokes are legible enough on the front of the label: the mezcal is an ensamble comprised of spirit made from the espadín, arroqueño and coyote magueys. But if you want to find out the exact composition from the side of the label, you’ll need very strong eyes and/or reading glasses. As the owner of eyes that are weaker every year, and of very cheap reading glasses, I needed to take a picture with my phone and blow it up to read the text. I was eventually able to make out that this batch contains 68% espadín, 20% arroqueño and 12% coyote; and also that every ensamble produced by Tio Rey is unique in composition and therefore profile. (And it turns out that, in keeping with the general handmade ethos of the operation, even the labels are produced from the recycled mash from the distillation.) So unless it’s from the same batch as mine (see the lot number below), these notes may not have much to do with your bottle of Vago Ensamble from Tio Rey. With that caveat, let’s see what this is like. Continue reading →

Gusto Historico, Madrecuixe, Victor Ramos

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I opened this month’s booze reviews with a mezcal (this excellent ixterro amarillo from Chacolo) and so I may as well close the month’s reviews with another mezcal. This is a release from Gusto Historico, an outfit set up by Marco Ochoa, one of the founders of Mezcaloteca, a well-known mezcaleria in Oaxaca. They are relatively new to the American market. They feature mezcals that are all made, I believe, in Miahuatlán in Oaxaca. They work with a number of maestros but the few releases I’ve seen in stores in the Twin Cities all seem to be made by Victor Ramos (whose mezcal has also been released by Mal Bien). Such was the release, a tobala, that I reviewed just about a year ago and such is the release I’m reviewing today: made from the madrecuixe maguey. This species of maguey apparently takes a long time to mature and has a low yield, which means it mostly appears in small-batch releases. I think this may be my first-ever madrecuishe—I’ve only taken baby steps into the world of mezcal over the last couple of years—and so I can’t tell you how typical this particular expression is of the broader varietal. I can tell you that I’ve had the bottle open for a few days now and have really been enjoying it. Here now are my notes. Continue reading →

Chacolo, Ixtero Amarillo

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It’s been a while since my last mezcal review. That review was of an añejo or aged mezcal (from Rancho Vale Madre in Oaxaca). Let’s get back now to joven or unaged mezcal, which is what I mostly drink. Technically, what I am reviewing today is not a mezcal. But only technically. Chacolo, you see, are located in Jalisco outside the Denomination of Origen for mezcal and so cannot use that name on their labels. But in every non-bureaucratic way this is mezcal, made in an exacting manner. Chacolo use the capon method of “castrating” the agave plant as it begins to send up a flowering stalk. But where most producers who use this method, leave the plants in the fields to concentrate their sugars for a few months, Chacolo let them rest for 3-4 years. Indeed, the mezcal I am reviewing today is made from Ixtero Amarillo maguey to which the capon process was applied for 4 years. Ixtero Amarillo is a variety of agave rhodacantha, and is an outlier in their fields: all the other agave they use are varieties of agave angustifolia, from which come most of the well-known types of mezcal. Another feature of interest is that the family’s fields are on volcanic soil, which is said to confer a greater mineral quality than usual to their mezcals. They are an interesting operation—you can read more about them on Mezcalistas. Continue reading →

Rancho Vale Madre Añejo: Straight and Mixed

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This month’s booze reviews kicked off with a rum: the Amrut Two Indies. Though this was not planned, it ended up becoming a non-whisky month, with two reviews of French brandies following: an Armagnac from Cardinat and a Calvados from Toutain. To close out the month, I have a mezcal. This represents novelty for me in two ways: this is a mezcal from a producer I have not previously encountered, and it is an añejo, having been matured in oak casks for at least a year. The producer is Rancho Vale Madre in Oaxaca. My friend Ben visited the distillery in February and very kindly brought me back this bottle. Unlike mezcals released in the US, this is a fairly bare bones label: there’s no detail of any kind on the production method or the variety of agave used; indeed, not even the abv/strength is noted (though I am pretty sure it’s around 40%). I was very curious to try it as the word on the American mezcal enthusiast street is not very positive on oak cask-aged mezcals in general. The thinking is that the quintessential qualities of mezcal are best expressed in joven/blanco spirit that has been “aged” only in glass. I’ve no idea what the status of añejo and reposado mezcals in Mexico more broadly or Oaxaca in particular is. Nor do I know very much about Rancho Vale Madre beyond the fact that they seem to a popular stop on mezcal tours in Oaxaca; the estimable Mezcal Reviews site does not list any of their releases. Anyway, as you’ll see below, while I enjoyed this añejo fine on its own, I think I will probably finish most of the bottle via cocktails. Continue reading →

Real Minero, Largo

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Here’s one more mezcal to close out the month in booze reviews. This is my second review of a mezcal from Real Minero, the storied Oaxacan operation. I’ve previously reviewed a batch of their Barril, which I enjoyed very much indeed. This week I have for you a review of a batch of their Largo. Largo is a variety of wild agave, apparently also known as Tobaziche in other areas. This batch was made from agave that averaged 14 years of age at the time of harvest. It was distilled in January 2023 in Filipino-style clay pot stills. All this information is from the rear label on the bottle, by the way. The Barril’s rear label notes it was rested in glass for six months before bottling; there’s no indication of resting in glass on the label of this Largo. I’m not sure which is the normal practice for Real Minero, or for that matter for mezcal producers more broadly. If you know more about this please write in below. I can tell you that I opened this bottle last week and it jumped right to the top of my not very extensive mezcal rankings. Here now are my tasting notes. Continue reading →

La Luna, Chino

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Mezcal November continues. Here is another release from La Luna. La Luna is based in Michoacán where members of the Perez Escot family—from which all of La Luna’s mezcaleros hail—has been making mezcal for four generations. They are a relatively recent brand but have a pretty good presence in the American market. At any rate, a lot of their expressions are available in Minnesota. I’ve previously reviewed a few of these: the Tequilana; the Manso Sahuayo; another Manso Sahuayo bottled for the Minnesota Agave Society; and an ensamble made from a mix of Tequilana, Manso Sahuayo and Cupreata. I’ve liked them all a lot. Today I have review of a bottle of Lot 50 of their Chino. Chino is apparently the name for the wild cultivar of the Cupreata maguey. As with most mezcals, there is a wealth of information on the production methods on the La Luna labels (though unlike Real Minero’s labels, La Luna’s labels dispense this information in Spanish; I like this touch). So I can tell you that the maguey is roasted in conical earthen ovens, spontaneously fermented and distilled in copper and pine stills. I don’t yet know enough about mezcal to make much of this information but perhaps it will be of interest to you. Here now are my notes on this bottle which I opened last week. Continue reading →

Real Minero Barril

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Real Minero is the name of the brand of mezcal made by the Ángeles family, who have been distilling mezcal in the town of Santa Catarina Minas in Oaxaca for more than a century now.  You can find out more about them in this report on Mezcal Reviews on a distillery tour in 2017. (Mezcal Reviews, by the way, is an essential resource for people like me who are new to mezcal.) Their mezcal is no longer officially called mezcal—the word no longer appears on their labels. This has to do with the bureaucratic headaches of the certification process: it is in fact mezcal in all but name only. The mezcal produced by the family has a very high reputation (and commands prices to match). I was lucky enough to find two bottles from a local liquor store at a significant discount last year. I’m not sure what led to that discount but I wasted no time in snapping them up. I will be reviewing both this month. First up, is a batch of the Barril, a maguey that is new to me. As per the label, the average age of the maguey used was 15 years old and it was all harvested in 2018. The mezcal itself was distilled in the second half of that year and then rested in glass for six months. I opened the bottle last week and have been enjoying it very much. Here now are my notes. Continue reading →

Gusto Historico, Tobala, Victor Ramos

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For the first booze review of the month, I have for you another mezcal. Last week I reviewed a special edition of La Luna’s Manso Sahuayo that was bottled for the Minnesota Agave Society. This week I have for you a tobala from Gusto Historico. Gusto Historico is a relatively recent brand. As far as I can make out, they are based in Oaxaca and bottle mezcals distilled by mezcaleros from the region, seemingly almost all from the town of Miahuatlan. Two of the main mezcaleros they work with are the father and son pair of Victor and Emanuel Ramos. This tobala was made by Victor Ramos. I specify this because they’ve also released a tobala distilled by Ignacio Juarez and another by Emanuel Ramos (the labels are of different colours and if that’s not enough to tell them apart, the names of the mezcaleros are on the rear labels that have lots of other detailed production info on them). I’ve liked all the (not-very many) tobalas I’ve tried so far and am looking forward to this one as well. Let’s get right to it. Continue reading →

La Luna, Manso Sahuayo (for Minnesota Agave Society)

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It’s been a while since my last mezcal review. This is not because I have stopped drinking mezcal. I’ve been drinking mezcal quite regularly, in fact. But on account of the fact that I am trying to keep the number of open bottles of any type of liquor on my shelves down at a manageable number, I have not opened any new bottles of mezcal in a while. Well, not till last week. My most recent opening is a La Luna release. As it happens, my last three mezcal reviews were also all of La Luna releases; Cupreata, Manso Sahuayo and Tequiliana. This latest was also distilled from Manso Sahuayo but was not a general release. It was bottled for the Minnesota Agave Society, a group based up in the Twin Cities. I recently established contact with a member of the group but I haven’t had time to actually ask about how this bottling came to be (or if they’ve bottled any/many others). I purchased my bottle from Surdyk’s in the summer but it’s also available at other Twin Cities liquor stores (I’ve seen it at South Lyndale Liquors as well). I rather liked my previous bottle of Manso Sahuato (that was Lot 23; this is Lot 76), finding it to be an earthy change of pace from the other mezcals I’ve had. I’m curious to see what this one is like. Continue reading →

La Luna, Ensamble

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And here’s a third La Luna to close out this week of La Luna mezcals. Unlike, Monday’s and Wednesday’s bottles, this one is not made from a single variety of agave but is a blend or ensamble of three. Two are Tequilana and Manso Sahuayo (the varietals Monday and Wednesday’s mezcals were distilled from) and the third is Cupreata. This bottle, despite having a black label, is different, by the way, from the original “black label” with which La Luna launched, which was 100% Cupreata. I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on some of that to try blending my own ensamble with different proportions of the three constituents. Anyway, let’s see what this one is like.

La Luna, Ensamble (46.12%; blend of Manso Sahuayo, Cupreata and Tequilana; from my own bottle)

Nose: A fairly balanced opening with some lime in the high notes, some vegetal bitterness in the low and a fair bit of sweeter fruit and a bit of smoke in the middle (charred pineapple). On subsequent sniffs it’s quite savoury. A few drops of water and…it doesn’t really change very much. Continue reading →

La Luna, Manso Sahuayo

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Mezcal week rolls on. You may recall that I am reviewing three mezcals from La Luna this week. On Monday I reviewed Lot 63 of their Tequilana. Today I have for you a review of Lot 23 of their Manso Sahuayo. Unlike Tequilana aka Blue Weber this is not a well-known agave variety or one that is in wide use. As per Mezcal Reviews it is an unclassified variety. I’m not sure if it’s found outside of Michoacán. It grows wild there but the plants used for La Luna’s mezcal are apparently cultivated. I have no idea what the typical yield from this variety is or what the characteristics of mezcal made from it are. It goes without saying that it is completely new to me and I’m curious to see what it’s like.

La Luna, Manso Sahuayo (48.51%, Lot 23; from my own bottle)

Nose: Less “green” and acidic than the Tequilana; quite a bit more earthy from the get-go, with a lot of decomposed leaves and damp earth. As it sits there’s some dill and some pine, and then some fruit begins to peep out (charred pineapple). With more time still, some savoury notes emerge (light ham brine). A touch of water and the lime and savoury notes expand a little. Continue reading →

La Luna, Tequilana

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It’s been a few weeks of nothing but whisky reviews. Let’s do another week of mezcal. This week’s reviews will all be of releases by La Luna. Based in the mountains of  Michoacán, La Luna produces mezcal from a range of agave types and seems to be quite widely available in the US. I base this latter statement on the fact that their mezcals are easy to find in Minnesota, and ours is not a state where a lot of specialty booze is easily spotted on shelves. You can find out more about the company here. The first one I am reviewing this week is Lot 63 of their Tequilana made from Blue Weber agave and bottled at 48.51% (the abv varies by lot number). This is the same agave that is used in the production of tequila. You may have encountered the statement, “all tequila is mezcal but not all mezcal is tequila”; well, this mezcal may effectively be a tequila—though unlike most tequilas this is made in an artisanal manner with the agave cooked in ovens and very long fermentation times and so on. Let’s see what it’s like. Continue reading →

Derrumbes, Tamaulipas

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And another Derrumbes to end this week of mezcal reviews (see here for the Amaras Cupreata, and here for the Derrumbes San Luis Potosi). This one comes from the state of Tamaulipas in Northeast Mexico. It is not made from a single agave varietal but is an ensamble or blend of spirit made from different varietals. Let’s get right to it,

Derrumbes, Tamaulipas (47%; Lot 10; from my own bottle)

Nose: A little bit of acetone off the top. Green peppers here as well—a mix of bell and serrano—but they’re not as pickled in vinegar as in the previous two. Slightly bitter on the second sip and there’s some vinegar now. No real sign of smoke in this one either. As it sits, lime emerges along with some pepper; some very mild lactic notes as well (buttermilk). Continue reading →

Derrumbes, San Luis Potosi

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Next up in this week of mezcal reviews is one of two releases I’ll be reviewing from Derrumbes. The company bottles mezcals made by producers from a number of different regions. This is from the state of San Luis Potosi and is made from a wild agave from the region: Salmiana. This agave apparently has a very low yield and the spirit made from it is said to exhibit some unique characteristics. I’m excited to give it a try and also a little bit apprehensive. Oh yes, the agave is cooked in above ground ovens prior to mashing and distillation, which results in non-smoky mezcal. As to whether that’s traditional for the region or this agave or just for this producer, I don’t know. If you know more, please write in below. Okay, let’s get to it.

Derrumbes, San Luis Potosi (44.3%; Lot 68; from my own bottle)

Nose: Comes in with a big bright burst of green chillies and vinegar. Under that are first earthier notes (dried mushrooms) and then a hit of blue cheese (or are those gym socks?). Some naugahyde in there too. The “green” notes become more vegetal with time and dominate. A few drops of water bring the gym socks back up to the top and then the blue cheese expands dramatically. Continue reading →