Soaring Demand Is Draining Mexico of Its Wild Agave Kevin Sieff, Luis Antonio Rojas and Tucker Harris - The Washington Post
go to original January 24, 2024

The plants used to make the world’s best mezcal are disappearing. (Joanna Pinneo)

The growing global market for mezcal has spurred a wild agave rush. Some species have effectively vanished. Harvesters now keep word of mature varietals — a few arroqueños hidden away in remote hills, a couple of tobala slung over a deep ravine — a closely held secret.

“The populations are disappearing little by little since they cannot regenerate adequately,” said Daniel Quezada Daniel, executive director of Mexico’s National Commission for Biodiversity. “Their scarcity leads to increased prices, and perversely leads to even further exploitation.”

Demand for mezcal, now a signifier of cool, has led American companies to buy land and distilleries in Oaxaca. Some have scoured the mountains and hills clean of wild agaves and seeded large plantations of espadin, the easiest agave to cultivate and the fastest to flower.

Those plantations are now producing some of the cheapest and — in many cases — least interesting mezcal.

But a small number of mezcaleros continue to work with wild agaves. They trek into the mountains, deeper each year as the plants get harder to find. Some are attempting to reforest the hill country — they collect seeds of endangered plants and scatter them in the wild. Others have launched efforts, still inconclusive, to domesticate wild varietals, which they are dubbing “semi-cultivated.”

Still others are fatalistic.

Foreign mezcal drinkers have adopted a taste for the wildest, scarcest agaves.

And as in any gold rush, eventually the raw material will vanish.

Read the rest at The Washington Post

Related: How the Mezcal Boom Is Threatening Wild Agave (Punch)

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