One of the most endearing things about mezcal is its versatility. There are dozens of agave species (called magueys in Oaxaca, Mexico, where most mezcal today is made) that can be used to make it, allowing for a playground of alluring flavors. Tequila, in contrast, must by modern definition be made only with a specific species, called blue agave or agave tequilana.
Despite this rainbow of potential, most mezcal today is made out of a single agave species, called Espadín. Browse the shelves on your next visit to a bar or liquor store, and you will see a few options made with agaves like Barril, Cuishe, Tobalá, or other species. But you’ll see Espadin the most, and it won’t be close.
Why, though? Does Espadín make for an objectively superior mezcal? Does it taste better? Is Espadín some hallowed and traditional agave of choice for mezcaleros?
The answers are no, probably not, and definitely not. Espadín is a relative newcomer to the mezcal game, and the reason it appears on so many bottle labels is because it fits right in with the business of producing mezcal, rather than the craft. A conspiracy may have been involved as well, but it’s hard to be sure.
To explain all that, we need to look back to the mid-1980s. While tequila was gaining popularity back then, mezcal was in low demand and prices were rock bottom. Producers were emerging from decades of corruption, exploitation, and de facto prohibitions. And Espadín magueys were all but unheard of.
Salomon “Tio Rey” Rodriguez, a veteran mezcalero who produces both independently and under the Mezcal Vago umbrella, spoke with VinePair as part of a special three-part Cocktail College podcast series, “Mezcal’s Untold Past, Soaring Present, and Fragile Future.” He told us that the fields around his home, near the small town of Sola de Vega in southern Oaxaca, were once rife with wild maguey species. But no more.
“Most of it was all Sierra Negra, Green Coyote, Barril…Espadín was unheard of when my father ran his plantation,” he recalls* in Part 2 of the series, “Now, after the 25, 30 years that I worked with him, I look around and I only see Espadín. Just Espadín.”
The switch to Espadín didn’t happen by accident. Tio Rey, and others we interviewed, recall Espadín being foisted upon the area in the 1980s. Government programs provided Espadín offshoots to struggling farmers gratis, and incentivized their planting. Exactly why Espadín got promoted this way is hard to say. In sterile economic terms, Espadín has a lot to offer: it matures quite fast for an agave species (usually in 8 years at most, versus up to 15 years for wild agave) and tends to yield more fermentable sugars to boot. That spells money today, but it doesn’t explain Espadín’s start. (Remember, mezcal wasn’t big business in the ’80s, and wouldn’t be for decades.)
On the podcast, some mezcaleros claimed that while the government was providing Espadín under the guise of economic uplift, tequila producers played a role behind the scenes. Their category was hustling to keep up with demand, leaving their own agave supply stretched. While Espadín was making its grand entrance into Oaxaca, tequila producers were reportedly also building a cyclical habit of traveling south from Jalisco and other tequila-centric regions during harvest season. According to Tio Rey and other mezcaleros VinePair interviewed, like Luis Arellanes Cruz, tequileros bought up Oaxacan magueys by the truckload to take back north. Cruz recalls them paying ten times the going rate, until they “emptied” the lands.
“They would take everything,” he says.
Cruz and another veteran mezcalero named Eduardo Angeles Carreno — who goes by the nickname Lalo — suspect that Espadín’s ascendence always had more to do with serving tequila than Oaxacan mezcal.
Genetically, Espadín is very similar to tequila’s blue agave, and they do not see that as a coincidence. They believe the tequila industry conspired with the government to seed Oaxaca with a reserve crop of agave they could use to shore up their own supply. “Espadín was not really made for mezcal,” Lalo says, “It was meant to be a backup … later when sales went up, they [tequila producers] had the raw material they needed.”
That’s quite an accusation, and one that’s difficult to prove. But after decades of seeing mezcal suppressed through corruption and meddling, a certain distrust of the government’s stated motives is at least understandable.
Even if Espadín wasn’t nefariously implanted into Oaxaca’s landscape to be tequila’s backup, it’s making the mezcal industry look more and more like the tequila industry all the same. Oaxaca’s diverse maguey species were long harvested in mixed-use farm fields (if not from the wild directly) for centuries, but today Espadín magueys are a monoculture — propagated clonally and planted alone in neat rows. Tequila’s blue agave is cultivated the same way.
This isn’t a simple cosmetic difference, either. The mezcaleros we interviewed emphasized that Espadín’s monoculture approach requires far more pesticides and fertilizers than older cultivation practices, and further leaves the plants more susceptible to disease. Indeed, the tequila industry has combatted similar obstacles for years.
More and more mezcal today is churned out via industrialized practices designed around efficiency, abandoning the more traditional approach that gave mezcal its distinctive character and versatile flavors. Espadín, with its faster growth cycles and fat, sugar-rich cores, has been similarly and singularly optimized.
Despite any such drawbacks, though, Espadín has undeniably helped mezcal production balloon in a surprisingly short time. Mezcal is more economically valuable as an industry than ever, but that growth is distributed unevenly. Small producers have been left behind by the industry’s Espadín-focused titans who have vacuumed up all that growth.
Some experts and industry insiders question whether all the agave nectar is worth the squeeze. In their book, “Agave Spirits: The Past, Present, and Future of Mezcals,” experts David Suro-Piñera and Gary Paul Nabhan explain that the areas of Oaxaca (an already impoverished state relative to the rest of Mexico) where the most Espadin is grown also correspond with higher poverty and food insecurity.
Suro-Piñera and Nabhan also highlighted environmental costs, citing journalistic reports that growing Espadín agave requires far more water than other species, and depletes the soil at faster rates. Add on top of that deforestation as producers clear new fields to boost supply, and contamination from increased pesticide use. And add on top of that the loss of diverse and wild maguey species in Oaxaca, some of which even face extinction. If Espadín continues to crowd out other maguey varieties, it affects more than just the spectrum of intriguing mezcal flavors—it also reduces the available genetic arsenal that can ward off future crop blights and disease.
Some mezcaleros, like Lalo, are working against this trend by prioritizing both sustainable practices on their farms and the use of local and diverse magueys in their mezcal. But it’s a strong tide to swim against.
“It’s very sad,” Lalo said, while talking with VinePair for the podcast series, “because people are changing the ways they consume, their recipes, their entire way of life due to the ambition of a few … You lose biodiversity, you lose the plants, you lose the knowledge.”
That loss could be existential. After all, if one of mezcal’s greatest strengths as a spirit is its diversity and versatility, what does it mean if the business of making that mezcal destroys that diversity, and removes that versatility from the market? Would mezcal still be mezcal?
Lalo, for one, thinks something incalculable will be lost.
“…[T]hat’s what’ll happen if people dedicate themselves only to drinking Espadín maguey,” Lalo believes. “Espadín is not endemic to Oaxaca. We will lose all this wealth that we have.”
*Tio Rey, and all other mezcaleros quoted in this article, gave their interviews for the series in Spanish, which we have translated.
