Mezcal, Tobasiche, 'Ancestral'

• Mezcal produced in Sola de Vega, Oaxaca, Mexico
• Maestro Mezcalero Eustaquio Velasco Ruiz
• 100% Tobasiche (Agave karwinskii) harvested at 14 years maturity
• Cooked in a traditional earthen pit oven
• Milled by hand using wood mallets (mazo)
• Fermented in open-air wooden vats (tinas)
• Distilled twice using traditional Filipino-style clay pot stills
• Wet bark, walnut skin, subtle notes of guava and mango skin, damp soil, sweet potato, cinnamon, raw cacao
• 52.3% ABV (ABV may vary from batch to batch)

Launched in 2021, El Jolgorio’s “Ancestral” special edition line has only been produced in collaboration with the Ruiz family of Sola de Vega. Alongside Santa Catarina Minas (home to Minero-style mezcal), Sola de Vega is one of just two remaining communities in the Central Valles where mezcal production is focused on the exclusive use of traditional clay pot stills.

It’s a challenge to get to the Ruiz family palenque. Sola de Vega is a solid 3–4-hour drive south from Oaxaca City, depending on conditions. Situated high in the mountains with minimal road access, the journey culminates in a two-mile hike, skirting and winding around the edge of precariously sheer hillside into the jungle beyond.

There is no small mechanical grinder here, nor tahona. Agave is all cooked in some of the small earthen pit ovens and milled entirely by hand using wooden mallets. The clay pots are strung together with delicate love, and every cracked or broken still is repurposed elsewhere at the Palenque—broken into shards to hold in heat in the fires or cracked into larger curving clay chunks and used in a makeshift grill to prepare lunch.

This sense of isolation, a remote outlier in the otherwise inexorably homogenizing world of Oaxacan mezcal, is part of what makes these Ancestral batches so precious. These are the kinds of mezcal batches that will only become harder and harder to find in Oaxaca in the coming years, from the kinds of communities who face harder and harder barriers bringing their spirits to market as the larger industry leans further into Espadín and cocktail pricing. When people describe these years as a “golden age” of Oaxacan mezcal, its productions like these they’re thinking about.