Some people will tell you that agave is at risk of becoming extinct. They'll tell you that you should primarily drink mezcal made from farmed espadin. But we tell you, gringo bartenders, that if you love mezcal, you should drink more wild agave, and you should get your customers to do so, too. Find out why in this episode of Agave Road Trip!

This episode of Agave Road Trip is brought to you by Ojo de Tigre Mezcal Artesenal. Ojo de Tigre is produced using artisanal practices and two types of agave – because two agaves are better than one. Easy on the land and easy on your wallet, Ojo de Tigre is mezcal for all. Learn more at ojodetigremezcal.com

Agave Road Trip is a podcast that helps gringo bartenders better understand agave, agave spirits, and rural Mexico. It’s hosted by Lou Bank and Chava Periban. 

Episode transcript

Lou:    So no one ever told me I had to keep my distance from the ROTC guys marching in front of me, and they suddenly stop [SOUND OF TEXT MESSAGE ARRIVING] Oh, hang on, let me answer these.

Chava: Sure.

Lou:    [SOUND OF TEXT BEING SENT] Okay, so these ROTC guys marching with their rifles start marching backwards, and begin hitting my hood, and stream— [SOUND OF 2 TEXT MESSAGEs ARRIVING] Wait, sorry.

Chava: You got some side hustle interfering with this side hustle, Lou? [SOUND OF TEXT BEING SENT]

 Lou:    No, it’s … well, friends are texting me all the time now when they’re at a bar, asking me which mezcal they should order.

Chava: Friends of yours? They don’t know what they want already?

Lou:    Some do, but for some … ordering mezcal has gotten as complicated as ordering wine.

Chava: That sounds intimidating.

Lou:    Right? And ordering great mezcal shouldn’t be intimidating.

Chava: You know that’s the tag line for Ojo de Tigre Mezcal Artesenal, right, Lou?

 Lou:    I know that Ojo de Tigre is the Mezcal for All.

Chava: That’s another tagline, Lou.

Lou:    Maybe it is, Chava, but two agaves are better than one, and Ojo de Tigre is made with both espadin and tobala.

Chava: Has Ojo de Tigre taken over your soul, Lou?

Lou:    No but Ojo de Tigre mezcal is taken from the soul and expressed with the hands.

Chava: Now I’m feeling a bit intimidated, Lou. How about we just have a copita full of Ojo de Tigre and pick this up in the morning?

Lou:    Ojo de Tigre Mezcal Artesenal – it’s easy on the land, and easy on your wallet!

Chava: I’m going to unplug Lou now. If you want to learn more about Ojo de Tigre, visit ojodetigremezcal.com

Lou:    [FADE OUT] Your mezcal should be as full of character as you are! Ojo de Tigre Mezcal Artesenal: Light on smoke, full on character!

 

Lou Bank [00:02:21] I am Lou Bank

 

Chava Periban [00:02:22] I am Chava Periban

 

Lou Bank [00:02:23] And this is Agave Road trip, the podcast that helps gringo bartenders better understand agave, agave spirits, and rural mexico, and today we're going to talk about the extinction of agave.

 

Chava Periban [00:02:33] Really? Like it's not that...

 

Lou Bank [00:02:35] feels like a National Geographic episode. What?

 

Chava Periban [00:02:39] Yeah, that's not like pandas or turtles. Agave's not going to go extinct,

 

Lou Bank [00:02:43] it's not going to go extinct? Then Who is going to go extinct?

 

Chava Periban [00:02:48] We are going to go extinct before agave.

 

Lou Bank [00:02:52] The reason I wanted to talk about this is because there have been articles written and the whisper among the the mezcal geeks is that you should only be drinking espadin on a regular basis, and if you're drinking mezcals or destilados de agave — agave spirits — that are made from wild agaves, that you are putting at risk all of those agave varietals that are growing in the wild.

 

Chava Periban [00:03:22] OK, I have a question. First, a lot of these people, they have traveled around Mexico, right?

 

Lou Bank [00:03:29] A lot of them have and a lot of them haven't. You know, some of them, they just fly right into Oaxaca and they'll, you know, maybe visit one or two communities outside of Oaxaca, if they've even done that.

 

Chava Periban [00:03:38] OK,  I'm going to start with something ... and actually ... You know,  I thought that I had a clear conclusion about this or I just literally just like—

 

Lou Bank [00:03:51] Three minutes ago, you seemed to know what you were going to say.

 

Chava Periban [00:03:54] I did. Yeah. Now I think it has drastically changed. when we travel around "agave land," or when we travel around Oaxaca, or Guerrero, or Durango, what I always say is that I see a lot of unused land and I've come across several academic papers or  journal papers where they try to explore agave as a remedy to eroded soils, to create ethanol, to make energy — various uses. And the argument usually goes like this: agave doesn't take almost any water to grow. It can grow in the poorest, most destroyed soil that you can find. And most importantly, it can grow  in a place where you can't grow anything else, it can thrive. So think about sugarcane. Think about palm oil. Think of all these other things where you have to go into the jungle and destroy everything you have around you to be able to plant that. Agave's not like that. You just go to the ugliest piece of land that you can find around and just like, Here I shall plant my agave. And it will grow. Beautiful! Probably it's going to take a little bit longer if it's uglier soil than not, but it will do the trick. So that is very confusing to me because if that's the case and I see a lot of unused land around Mexico, how would it be possible for agave to go extinct?

 

Lou Bank [00:05:34] Right. Well, we've got this really interesting quote from from our pal Luis Nino de Riveraover at Mezcal Amaras. So let's run that quote

 

Luis Nino De Rivera [00:05:52] if we keep consuming wild agaves, but nobody is having a plan to let them wildly reproduce or a planting plan, we can end species. That's the thing.

 

Lou Bank [00:06:07] OK, so yes, so what's the plan?

 

Luis Nino De Rivera [00:06:10] For us, it's planting. More than half of our hectors are wild agaves, planted. And the idea is that the communities teach the community to control how many agaves should be harvested each year. How many should you leave to reproduce so you have more later on. So Durango has that. Guerrero has that. Oaxaca, it doesn't have that.

 

Lou Bank [00:06:41] Oaxaca does not have that? When you say Guerrero has that, like literally there's a state plan?

 

Luis Nino De Rivera [00:06:47] State plan — state and community.

 

Lou Bank [00:06:49] But in Oaxaca, none of the communities that you work with have a plan like that?

 

Luis Nino De Rivera [00:06:53] Very few.

 

Lou Bank [00:06:54] OK, so that's an interesting point made by Luis, right? We're not talking about agave going extinct. We're talking about specific communities within Mexico that are feeling significant environmental pressure as a result of the consumption of spirits made from this plant, right?

 

Chava Periban [00:07:14] Yes. And I think ... why I'm not so sure of what I what I had said before is that, I think it's more that it might be the diversity that might be endangered and not agave as a whole. Right?

 

Lou Bank [00:07:30] Right. It's sort of like if you go to to Jalisco and you see these fields of Blue Weber agave that are being grown like traditional farming and you see these huge monocultures developing, I guess that's maybe—

 

Chava Periban [00:07:45] Yes. And the fact that there wouldn't be enough available agaves to actually make spirits, I think that's the extinction they're trying to refer to. Because you might find a few agaves laying around and use them for decoration — which, by the way, I really think a lot of mezcaleros could make so much more money if they were selling their agaves to landscapers. But that's a different episode. But I think the preoccupation is, what if there's not enough agave to keep on making spirits of different species?

 

Lou Bank [00:08:18] Well, OK, so let's talk about that. Let's assume that the conversation is not about agave going extinct. Let's assume the conversation is about developing a monoculture in specific communities in Oaxaca. And if that is the conversation, then shouldn't we be encouraging people to drink spirits made from wild agave? Otherwise, all that's going to show up in Oaxaca in these communities is espadin that's farmed.

 

Chava Periban [00:08:46] Yeah, and the thing about wild agave, which I find really funny about the whole narrative about it, it's like *wild* agave. It's main economical significance, in the last decade, was that it was *free* agave. So a lot of producers could offer extremely good prices because they were not paying for their agave.

 

Lou Bank [00:09:11] Well ... I mean, there's free and there's free. And when you're saying free, what you're talking about is that person — that mezcalero or mezcalera — spent years minding that land on which the agave was grown, because it's not just free agave, it's the community's agave. The land is the community's.

 

Chava Periban [00:09:36] Now, that's a whole different discussion. But OK, so I think let's go back to track a little bit.  because if we go there, it's going to take me a while to really get the detail. I guess the question here is about the diversity of agave. You need to realize that there there's many different species growing shoulder by shoulder. So that's sort of the idea. But how many agaves per plot of land means diversity? You know? Because diversity is ... like if you're talking about a classroom, in Mexico, most of the classrooms are absolutely not diverse. We're all Mexicans. There's not one gringo, one Canadian, one guy from Iraq. So it's a not diverse classroom. Even if you have a tall kid, a short kid, like what do we call diversity when it comes to agave? Do you need five species per acre of land, ten species, 15 species? Like what's the criteria there?

 

Lou Bank [00:10:35] Right. Right. And when you get down to the bottom line of this, is the question, Should we not be only harvesting agave that's farmed? Or should we only harvest farmed agave? And should we farm different agaves together? I guess the point is it's a much more complex conversation that I don't think can be answered simply by saying, well, if you want to protect agave from going into extinction, then you shouldn't drink wild agave. I think that diverges from the actual purpose.

 

Chava Periban [00:11:19] Yeah. Because your point is, give value to something and people are going to take better care of it.

 

Lou Bank [00:11:26] Yeah. I mean, it's only in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years that the world has paid attention to mezcal and for hundreds and hundreds of years while you had this, as you put it, free agave in the wild, these communities didn't overharvest and didn't kill it, then why would they kill it now? I get that the capitalism of the larger world has started to creep into some of these communities, at least to some extent — more so than it did 30 years ago. But I still think that there is this multigenerational wisdom in enough parts of rural Mexico that these families are going to protect their land and the earth that's given so much to them and their families.

 

Chava Periban [00:12:19] Yeah, and my final argument is, something that we keep finding when we're traveling are these stories of how the young generations are learning from the older men or women of the community, how mezcal has become this process of young kids getting closer to the older people and saying, like, OK, there's something that you know, that now the world is paying a lot of attention to. How can you translate that to me? And I think that that's not just how do you distill, how do you ferment? And that's something they kept repeating to us. All the pictures you see are inside the distillation process. But the land, the agave itself, and the very subtle, fragile ecosystems that can sustain a very diverse agave — and not only agave, because if you're just thinking agave, then you're making this wrong. It has to be an ecosystem. It includes agave but includes a lot of other things if you want to do this right. So I think that's more of the discussion. How do we have a truly diverse ecosystem and not just some diverse agave gardens around you?

 

Lou Bank [00:13:28] Yeah, you know, I'd say you're right. And I'd also say that you just you just gave me this picture in my head that's an important picture to hold, which is that the hipsters in rural Mexico are much cooler than the hipsters in Chicago.

 

Chava Periban [00:13:42] How does that work? Oh, like the hippies,

 

Lou Bank [00:13:48] the hipsters who are taking the old ways. The hipsters are just throwing back to the old stuff. But in rural Mexico, when they're throwing back to the old stuff, they're doing what grandma and grandpa used to do, which is, you know, learning how to make things from scratch using pre-industrial methods. Now, that's that's ultra hipster.

 

Chava Periban [00:14:06] Yeah. I had never thought about that. Like, it's way beyond fixy bikes and long beards.

 

Lou Bank [00:14:16] Okay, Chava, I think we have we've nailed this down as hard as we can. Hasta pronto.