Mezcalero Special No. 5 - Wild Cenizo

48% ABV

We were absolutely delighted to discover a stash of this lovely bottling along with some others from Mezcalero with a distributor who was sadly going out of business. We bought everything that we could as it's truly a complex and engaging expression. This is 100% wild grown Cenizo (Agave Durangensis) from the village of Nombre de Dios in Durango, Mexico. Maestro Vinatero (distilleries are known as "Viñatas" in Durango) Don Rubén Solis Lozano pit roasted the high altitude grown wild agaves in an earthen pit with mesquite wood. The agaves were crushed by hand with machetes and wooden mallets and fermented in underground pits with ambient yeasts. The mash was double distilled in a wood fired Filipino-style still that has a copper pot with a wooden cap.

Producer Tasting Notes:
Spicy well-defined flavor from the acidity typical of this silvestran agave, minerality from the rocky soil, woody aromatics from the use of the wood cap, feral complexity from wild yeasts: these qualities are focused to perfection by Immaculate craft distillation of this difficult agave at the hands of a master.

About Mezcalero:
Mezcalero was founded in 2009 and it was a groundbreaking project. They were the first export brand to list production details and the name of the producer, or “Mezcalero” on the label. There was very little information available at that time about the category or how it was made, so these details on the labels were intriguing to mezcal lovers like us!

It was started by Hector Vasquez from Los Danzantes Mezcal in Oaxaca, and American Ainsley Coale of Craft Distillers. The concept was to feature batches from some of the best Mezcaleros in Oaxaca, using a majority of wild or semi-wild “silvestre” grown agaves. In those early days of Mezcal in America, it was the first time we had ever thought about a BATCH of Mezcal, and the concept of wild grown agaves was novel as well. Their goal was to fairly compensate the producers for their work in hopes of preserving the traditional methods of production in their respective communities. This is a model that has been copied over and over again but we can’t stress enough how unusual and exciting this was to agave lovers like ourselves at that time.