The Spirit of Place
it's time for wild minds.
Dear mezcal lovers,
Terroir is a term closely connected to wine that evolved from the observations of winemakers, as they understood the significance of place and time and its connection to taste. This understanding — how different places produce different wines, even if they are made with the same grape — is also applicable to mezcal.
If you think of wine and its different varieties — like Merlot, Chardonnay or Syrah — they all come from a single plant, vitis vinifera. Mezcal is currently produced from around 60 different species of agave and yet this diversity is not celebrated, nor is it protected.
When standing on the Virgen family’s land, amongst trees and bushes and many varieties of agave, I looked to a neighbouring property, a monoculture focused on blue agave. Tomás Virgen is looking after his land in the same way his father, and his father’s father, before him, with the knowledge of how it has existed for over a hundred years. The mezcal they create is a reflection of this relationship, with place and time. Read the full story below… ✨
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Zack Sanders grew up in the small town of Chester in Connecticut. “Everyone knew each other, it was the kind of place you could walk into somebody’s home and it was totally fine.” Growing up in Chester made Zack what he calls “a community oriented person”. When he left his hometown to study urban planning, Zack found community working as a bartender.
“You meet a lot of people working behind a bar, a lot of people who need to pay rent, a lot of people who lost their jobs… It is definitely a place where people go to find community when you don’t have family support or you don’t have that traditional connection.” I’d always appreciated a bar as a kind of meeting place to connect with friends or family, but I’d never visited one to meet people for the first time, even though I was meeting Zack for the first time, as we sat at the bar of De La O Cantina in Guadalajara. Zack was part of a delegation of Los Angeles-based bartenders — Zack and Max Reis from Mírate; Matthew Belanger from Death and Co.; and Edwin Rios, who works at both venues — that took over De La O for one night, to serve cocktails with Mexican produce and to connect with Guadalajara’s hospitality community. I was invited by one of De La O’s owners, Pedro Jiménez Gurría.
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