Mezcal bottle-share

While I still have not reviewed any of the FEW Spirits bottlings from that bottle-share, the next one is already sitting on the table to be sampled and sent.

As indicated in my New Year’s resolutions I wanted to do a Mezcal bottle share since I picked up a resonably ridiculous fascination for it. Why ridiculous? I’ve ever tasted some three mezcals, ever. And now I would want to buy multiple bottles.

A bottle-share seemed the answer and while browsing around for booze for a tasting at work I found a Dutch webshop that had them at quite some nice prices. Of course, I’m not settling for some bottom shelf mezcal and I want to hop in at the top end with some booze from Del Maguey.

According to the internet, Del Maguey brought mezcal back from the dead in the United States during the nineties with their single village bottlings and getting rid of that ridiculous worm. (You don’t want flies in your beer or wine, why would you want a worm in your mezcal?)

So, I bought four bottles, sent out some emails to the steady crew of Dutch bottle-sharers yesterday. But, I still have two spots to fill.

A set of 10cl of each of the four bottles will set you back € 40 (without shipping). If you like, you can also get 5cl of each for € 25. For this you’ll get a sample of each of the following mezcals:

The ‘Vida’ is the entry level mezcal and indicated being from San Luis del Rio. It’s created in a very old fashioned way by roasting the agave in earth pits and using wild yeasts for fermentation. It’s then distilled twice before resting and bottling.

The other three are the more high-end from the range and come from a variety of villages from around Oaxaca. Chichicapa and Minero are made from Espadin agave (like 90% of all mezcal) but the San Luis Del Rio Azul is made from Azul agave. Whether or not this is the regular blue agave used in Tequila is not clear, but I don’t think they’d promote that.

I’ve not tasted any of them yet, but I’m already thoroughly enjoying myself. I opted for mezcal for a possible second fascination that would bite my whisky budget massively. Mostly because everything about the drink is completely different from whisky, from ingredients, to cooking, to fermentation. I even decided to not get any reposado (rested in oak) or añejo (rested in oak for longer) because I do not want to get an oak flavor this time.

Anyway, if you’re game, let me hear it. There are only a couple spots left, in total 25 cl, so depending on the size, it varies from 3 to 5 spots.

About Sjoerd de Haan-Kramer


5 Responses to Mezcal bottle-share

  1. Ol' Jas says:

    Just a general warning: I went through a bottle of Chichicapa last year based on recommendations that its smokiness might appear to fans of Islay-style peat. I strongly disliked it and found it to have very little of the appeal that Islay-style peat has. So don’t go into it with that expectation.

  2. Billy says:

    The Azul thing might be to do with the ‘fun’ regulations around Mezcal and Tequila. I was talking to our Agave King at work the other day about the regulations, and the Tequila folks are very keen on Mezcal labels not to mention things that might make people think they are Tequila. There was a move to stop the word ‘agave’ appearing on Mezcal bottles, so forbidding the phrase ‘blue agave’ in English to stop confusion with Tequila, which has to be made from blue agave, sort of makes sense.

    That said, he also told me that the laws are all a bit in flux at the moment anyway and that some changes have been working their way through since last year. Things take a while to get done in Mexico. Once everything’s settled down, I’m going to extract all of the Mezcal legal info I can from his brain and put it up on TWE.

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