The important role of mezcal tour guides
It is really quite difficult to overstate the effect of tourism on both the conservation and evolution of Mexico’s cultures and traditional products. On the one hand, it creates markets that can save a product from disappearing, but on the other, those same markets create pressure for change.
The cautionary tale here is that of tequila, which like mezcal, was a drink for the rural poor, made in small stills for local consumption. US Prohibition, then its popularity as a cheap “party” drink in the US not only created the huge demand that exists today, it has completely changed how the blue agave is grown, processed and marketed.
The current boom in mezcal is, in part, a reaction to this, and there are encouraging signs that perhaps mezcal’s internationalization may not suffer the same fate. One of these signs is the work of educational tour guides in places like Oaxaca, which has the potential to spread into all of the 10 states in which mezcal can be produced under that name.
Such tours are labors-of-love that require time and infinite patience to juggle the demands of two very different worlds – those of clients in the “modern world” looking to have everything arranged just so and those of rural Mexico, which demand carefully-crafted relationships to build trust, adaptation to a very different relationship with time. The tour guides here have put in many hours to build relationships not only with the mezcaleros themselves, but their communities. In addition, they must always think on their feet and have a “Plan B” in case a mezcalero or restaurant owner is not available for whatever reason. The reward, however, is an authenticity that no “big bus” stopping at a watering hole can match, that not only benefits the tourists who get to appreciate where and how this fine spirit comes to be, but also benefits mezcal communities with fair compensation for their collaboration with the guides.
I had the privilege to interview five highly-capable entrepreneurs who have seen the potential in Mexican mezcal and the importance of promoting the spirit in a responsible way – and that includes tours that allow clients to appreciate the culture and people behind the spirit.
Each has his/her story to tell but, all five have some very important things in common worth mentioning from the start.
- All have strong ties to the region and cultures that their tours interact with. They were raised there or spent a very significant part of their youth living among the communities in which they work.
- All combine knowledge gained from working with maestro mezcaleros (master mezcal makers) with that from formal studies in urban universities, which not only gives them a more comprehensive view of the spirit that neither working in the field or reading a book can give.
- All entered the world of mezcal in an organic way. None woke up one morning and just simply decided to take advantage of mezcal’s growing popularity. All came into contact with local, unbranded mezcals through connections through family and/or friends, and have worked to promote them through various channels.
- All have spent years cultivating and maintaining relationships with small mezcal producers – no small feat as almost all live in rural communities that are often suspicious of outsiders (and not without good reason, unfortunately). Even in Oaxaca, where tourism is highly developed, most cannot simply walk into a mezcal-producing palenque in many isolated places.
- All contextualize the making and drinking of mezcal as part of the local culture, introducing local food, the lives that mezcaleros and their families live, the local environment and more. This is in sharp contrast to most “big bus” drinking tours that dominate tequila country and unfortunately are beginning to appear for mezcal.
- All consider themselves “bridges” between the world of mezcaleros and the clients who look to visit them. All understand the difficulties involved in having an “authentic” mezcal experience, from finding it in the first place to realizing that clients will very likely need sunscreen.
Let’s meet some of the guides who have decided to promote and conserve mezcal traditions in Mexico.
Oaxaca
The most obvious place to begin is Oaxaca. First, mezcal is so strongly associated with this state that it is often mistakenly believed mezcal originated here. You can thank its decades-long cultural tourism industry for that. Mezcal had always been a part of the general tourism scene, with visitors often buying a bottle in the city or stopping by one of many “tourist stops” along the highways leaving Oaxaca city. Mezcal tourism per se, until the drink’s international rise in the late 2000s,has had a well-developed general tourism infrastructure to piggy-back onto. In essence, mezcal has moved from being just a footnote to a star of the show.
The timing of mezcal’s rise could not have been better for Oaxaca. At that time, the state was still recovering from the sharp drop of visitors after the violent teachers’ strikes of 2006 and the long-standing dispute over the toll booth in Nochixtlan.
The general “let’s stop here to get a taste of mezcal before we move on” type tours still exist, but to delve any deeper than that, you still need a knowledgeable guide. Such did not exist 10-15 years ago, and some young entrepreneurs were in a unique position to provide a unique service – to connect traditional mezcaleros in often-isolated places with international visitors with no idea where to find “authentic mezcal.” Oaxaca was a natural leader for such tourism as most already focused on its traditional cultures.
Pride in their home state and its way of life is strongly evident in the work of guides like Anabel Jacinto Blanco, Darinel Silva and León Langle. As Jacinto says “As Oaxaqueños, with a percentage of indigenous blood, it is our obligation to promote our culture.”
Anabel Jacinto Blanco
Jacinto is a native of the Central Valleys, which extend out from Oaxaca city. She grew up just outside the state capital, but spent weekends with her grandparents in the markets of rural Zimatlán. She admits that being a child, those visits did not impress her that much but obviously something stayed with her.
She did her formal schooling in the city of Oaxaca, so was no stranger to the myriad of foreign tourists that come here every year. She was working in another field when she met Susan Coss of Mezcalistas, who asked her for help researching the area’s mezcals in 2010/2011. Jacinto was aware of the beverage as a consumer, but had not gone out to the palenques (traditional distilleries). However, she did have familial and other local contacts to get started.
The collaboration with Coss was an eye-opener. Mezcal has always been a part of life for oaxaqueños, but learning about the process, flavors and culture gave her a new appreciation – one that has taken over her life. Just a peek inside her home filled mezcal containers of all shapes, sizes and materials attests to that.
Jacinto realized that she could bring palenque-produced mezcal to people interested in appreciating it. She has worked to export to Guatemala, and helped various mezcaleros get their products regulated to reach larger markets. She also has a private tasting room in Oaxaca city called Recia to allow visitors to try a wide range of products.
Tours began when Coss began referring chef friends to her who wanted to visit palenques. At first, they were very simple affairs, with clients accompanying her on public transportation as she did not have a car. But as requests grew, she eventually quit her regular job in 2017 and bought a vehicle to dedicate herself to tours full time.
Her tours marry her connections with rural towns in the Central Valleys with her urban experience. “I am Indigenous, 100% Oaxaca,” she says. “The maestros have shared with me what they have learned in the fields and the process of making mezcal, and I am thankful to them for this opportunity, but my formal schooling in the city gives me a different perspective on culture, traditions, customs and more. These forms of learning do not compete against each other. They compliment each other.”
This dual education allows her to anticipate clients’ needs, such as leading conversations during the long car rides, the desire to try local food and to have palate cleansers such as cheese and jicama between sips during tastings.
León Langle
Like Jacinto, Langle’s story is a mix of urban and rural. He was born in Mexico City, but he moved to Oaxaca with his family at the tender age of nine.
When a bit older, mezcal drinking simply became a part of his life, but it wasn’t until he had the chance to buy into one of Oaxaca city’s first bars to specialize in mezcal in 2009, that he realized how little he knew about the spirit.
Fortunately for him, the artist who founded the bar was willing to teach him, and Langle became a very eager pupil. Langle began meeting mezcaleros and learning about the process, while he also learned the bar/restaurant business as well as distribution of a label.
Informal tours grew out of these activities. Promoting mezcal means taking clients out to palenques and imbibing them with an appreciation that mezcal is not a way to get drunk, but a way to experience a highly-respected culture.
The increasing popularity of these visits and the rising number of foreigners arriving to Oaxaca during the pandemic prompted him to take the plunge into offering his services more formally as a tour guide. His urban connections and experience with foreigners in a bar setting were definite assets, but he still found the shift daunting – if for no other reason than that he started the business during the economic chaos of the pandemic.
The basic setup, then and now, is still the same – a small group travels out to a producer to see how mezcal is produced there and try some of the stock. Lunch is at a restaurant that Langle arranges beforehand and focuses on traditional local cuisine. Everything is done in one day and rarely is there time for more than one palenque.
Clients’ strong desire to see mezcal in process has led him to one tour option that is somewhat controversial. Traditional palenques generally operate only during the dry season – roughly November to May. (The rainy season is prime farming time.) Since tourism is a year-round phenomenon in central Oaxaca, Langle has connected with a larger mezcal distillery in Santiago Matlatán so that clients can experience mezcal when the smaller producers have closed their palenques. While the large distillery produces year-round it does not quite have the same ambiance as a small, rural farm.
Langle believes that mezcal production is changing in Oaxaca, with both upsides and down. More families are able to maintain their tradition of mezcal production and younger generations are willing to experiment with flavors, modern production and agave plant management. The downside is that tiny mezcal producers are disappearing as focus shifts to brands over who produces the spirit. It is the same path of internationalization that tequila has already tread, and no one knows just how far it will go for mezcal.
Darinel Silva
Darinel Silva’s mezcal journey began with a friend who was developing a mezcal at a ranch in the very small isolated San Cristóbal Lachirioag in the Sierra Norte de Oaxaca. It was not an easy project, but his friend finally got his big break when a reporter from NPR got wind of the story and came to check it out.
Silva was the one to take the reporter around for the story and the connections from this experience began a collection of contacts from which Silva would build a base of clients. This unexpected opportunity combined two of Silva’s loves – mezcal and travel.
Most of Silva’s tours are one-day affairs and depending on where the palenque is, can be a very long day. Miahuatlan is his preferred place for most tours. Not only is it reasonably close to Oaxaca city, his grandfather there had a connection with mezcaleros of old – storing product that went unsold during the town’s weekly Friday market for the following week. Memories of the smells and sites of that market makes it a favored focus of his work to this day.
Today, Silva has 10 years’ experience as a mezcal tour guide, although he never planned on his life turning out this way. One thing led to another and now he not only helps his friend but many other mezcal producers in one way or another. Silva in particular contrasts his work with that of the “big bus” tours, able to give clients insights they cannot. For example, Silva says, “if the mezcal comes in a clay jug, it is almost guaranteed to be local, small production.”
Outside of Oaxaca
Great mezcal is produced all over Mexico, but most is still unknown to those outside of their locations. Ten states (whole or in part) are part of the Denominacion de Origen and can legally call their agave-based spirits “mezcal” but the lack of tourism is often the main reason why their products, and the cultures behind them still remain unknown.
It reflects a lack of tourism development in general, but it also means there are still many opportunities for mezcal aficionados to “discover” a spirit still made the same way it was 100+ years ago by a family which has done this for generations.
Guides in these areas are often in the position that Oaxaca guides were 15+ years ago, creating new connections in a very nascent market.
San Luis Potosí
With the exception of the Pacific coast, Mexico north of Mexico City has been all-but-ignored by domestic and international tourism. There are various reasons for this, some related to the less-than-charming attitudes those in power have towards the north, and some related to the fact that the north’s economy has been more tied to international manufacturing trade.
San Luis Potosí is in a unique position to change this as it straddles the line, both in the past and today, between central and northern Mexico. The city has grown tremendously as part of a trade corridor between Mexico City and the border at Laredo and is easy to visit for many Mexicans and Americans.
It also has an excellent tradition of mezcal production, although tourism based on it is still in its infancy.
Miguel Galarraga Robledo was born in Morelia, Michoacán, but his mother is from San Luis Potosí and he spent much of his childhood in the state. Mezcal was an important part of his teenage and young adult years even though it was not well-regarded at the time.
He studied economics and international trade in college, and worked for a time in the medical field but in 2014 he quit to work as a volunteer in Haiti. This was a life-changing experience for him because although the Haitians he worked with were desperately poor, reputation was still more important than money – a lesson he took with him into mezcal.
Returning home, he partnered with friends to start a hostel which put in touch with many ecotourists, eventually getting federally-certified as a tour guide in the 2010s. He began with ecotourism, but since mezcal is often produced in these same rural areas, the shift to viñatas (as traditional distilleries are called here) was natural.
“Attitudes towards agave spirits have changed since I was a teenager.” Robledo notes. “It was looked down upon back then, but I did not care.” He even brought his love of mezcal to Haiti, the sharing of which he calls his “first tasting event.”
Like others in this article, Robledo realized that his love of reading, plus outside experience, could be of benefit to Potosí mezcaleros, getting their products to markets unknown to them and bringing visitors to their distillation facilities. His work has been two-sided- with mezcaleros he has convinced some to make their facilities more visitor-friendly with simple things like shade and bathrooms. In the city, he has lobbied state and federal authorities to improve efforts to bring more visitors to San Luis Potosí.
Although San Luis Potosí has done more than other northern states to promote its culture and natural beauty for tourism, Robledo admits that he is “…essentially creating a project from scratch…” as there isn’t the kind of infrastructure that there is further south. Despite the difficulties, 3-4 tours a week is the norm, attesting to mezcal’s potential, especially among aficionados looking for new experiences.
Mixteca Poblano
Even in states where tourism is a significant part of the economy, like Puebla, there are regions that are neglected. The Mixteca region is a hot, dry region named after the indigenous people that still dominate the culture here as well as parts of neighboring Oaxaca and Guerrero states.
It is a very poor area, and the Mixtec may be better known for its diaspora communities in the north of Mexico and the US than their homeland. Although only marginally suitable for agriculture, agave does grow in abundance and the mezcal boom may work its magic here as well.
Cesar Lima of Tentzo tours works to that end. Originally from the neighboring state of Tlaxcala, Lima moved to Puebla to go to college.
“My main goal [in life] was not being a “mezcal guy” or mezcal tour guide.” he says. However, while in college, he worked as a bartender and a friend invited him to visit San Nicolas Huajuapan, a tiny village to the east of the Pueblo Mágico de Atlixco to check out the area’s waterfalls and mezcal dispensaries. “Long story, short,” Tentzo says, he wound up connecting with the San Nicolas community and while he did think there was a business opportunity of some sort, it was not his main goal initially for this interaction. He had no idea if doing tours would ever be feasible here, but that is exactly what he has been doing for 10 years now.
Lima says he decided against starting his own brand, despite the fact that it might have made more business sense. Instead his sense of community led towards promoting the almost-entirely unknown mezcaleros find markets. One way he did this was to bring people from the beverage industry to the region to not only introduce them to the different mezcals, but to the culture and people behind them.
He did not consider himself a tour guide per se at first, and did not even charge for almost seven years, but his work caught the attention of Mezcalistas which began to promote his work, increasing both business and formality.
Lima works primarily with three communities as a guide, San Nicolas Huajuapan, where it all began, two villages in the municipality of Tepejuma, all near Atlixco. He occasionally runs tours to the Caltepec municipality, a four-hour drive from Puebla city over the rugged terrain that separates that state from Oaxaca. It’s still a day trip- albeit very long one – and appeals mostly to “mezcal heads,” he says – those who are avid aficionados still looking for something new.
San Nicolas remains the most popular of his tours not only because of proximity, but because it now has 14 running distilleries (that Lima is aware of) each with its unique qualities. The sales of mezcal and the tours have just about saved the town, Lima says. “Today, the people here love mezcal. It has provided economic development where there was almost none and this helps slow the migration of people out of the area.”
What makes these tours special is the same as what makes mezcal special, the emphasis still on small-scale production and the various regional and local cultures that produce a myriad of experiences. When these guides began, mezcal was (and in many places still is) in its infancy, with individuals finding a need to “discover” authentic mezcal in context.
Preserving the small-scale tour
As important as these small, intimate tours are to the development of mezcal production in rural Mexico, they and the mezcal they produce are under the same pressures.
Mezcal prices have risen significantly due to supply and demand and some balk at this given the drink’s history as that of the poor. Similarly, some are reluctant to pay more for tours like these when they can “visit” and try mezcal more cheaply on more general tours. However, like everything else in life, you get what you pay for. Cheaper tours do not and indeed cannot offer the chance to talk to a true maestro mezcalero as such an experience does not scale. The tourist stops along highways do indeed sell mezcal produced in the state, but they are far removed from those who make it and at best provide a museum-like replica of a palenque.
Tours like those provided by the above guides and others help preserve a way of life that the big bus tours cannot. They provide economic support that depends on preserving traditional processes and lifestyles, rather than changing them to meet production quotas
They promote the dignity of rural cultures and a sense of responsibility for the mezcal drinkers to see their consumption in terms of a cultural affair – which does include paying a higher price for mezcal in large part to help keep traditional mezcal production sustainable both socially and ecologically.
It is impossible to overstate the role of these guides as “bridges” (as several mentioned) between worlds with little direct contact and more-than-a-little mistrust. For urban visitors, life here may seem incomprehensible, with different rules and often a different sense of time. Guides who can navigate and reconcile the two worlds such that both benefit and neither are taken advantage of are indeed quite rare. One main reason for this is that these guides spend large amounts of time cultivating and maintaining their personal relationships with mezcal producers and their communities, so that they are accepted and by extension, so are their clients. To be honest, I think these guides really do enjoy all the festivals, baptisms and more they attend as they do care about the communities they work with.
They also care about their clients. This runs the gamut from making sure they have small, but vital necessities such as sunblock to dispelling fallacies about mezcal and making sure clients appreciate the history and culture of their home regions. “They cannot remember everything I tell them,” Jacinto says, “but I want them to take away just how much hard work and community is involved in the making of authentic mezcal.”
Mezcalistas has a resource page with information about touring various mezcal regions through out Mexico. All guides listed have been vetted. Mezcalistas receives no monetary compensation for listing any guides on the website, nor does it receive any booking fees or any other compensation from guides for any tours booked.
Leave a Comment