Worming its way into hearts

IT’S all about the worm.

A scrum of tourists rushed the tasting bar of Mezcal Beneva’s restaurant-distillery Rancho Zapata, just a few yards from the kilometer 42.5 marker on the Oaxaca-Istmo highway.

Eighteen-year-old Marisol Reyes had just given us a guided tour of the distillery, called a palenque in Spanish. She told us about the agave plants and how they’re harvested and cooked. We watched a donkey drag a huge stone wheel round and round a track crushing agave pulp. We saw agave juice fermenting in copper vats, infusing the air with the smell of charcoal and burned sugar. We sampled young mescals and mescals aged six months in oak casks. We tried flavored versions, like cappuccino and passion fruit.

Now it was time to get on with it.

A woman behind the bar put a shot glass of youthful mescal in front of two tourists who were about the relative maturity of the liquor. One happened to be my stepson, Ben Shepard, who’s in his early 20s. The woman fished out two pale worms -- each about 1 1/2 inches long -- from a jar and placed them on a wedge of lime.

The cameras came out. The crowd hushed. Ben’s mother winced.

“Salud,” the woman said.

They drank. They chomped down on the limes. They swallowed the worms.

Mescal tradition was maintained.

“How’d it taste?” I asked.

“Not bad,” Ben said. “Bland.”

I asked the barkeep if she ever eats the worms.

“Ay!” she exclaimed, “No!”

*

Tequila’s cousin

ARTISANS are one of the attractions of the state of Oaxaca, and nearly every village seems to specialize in some world-class craft: black pottery, rugs, rustic figurines.

Although Oaxaca city has been roiled by protests and police action, the villages still move at their traditional easy pace. We avoided politics and stuck to exploring the art of making mescal, of which Oaxaca, by tradition and government designation, is the capital.

Mescal is made from the native agave plant, those fleshy succulents with spear-like fronds. If you dig up an agave and cut off the fronds, you get a pina -- a pineapple. Roast, pulp, squeeze, ferment and distill the pineapple and, eventually, you get a clear liquor whose taste varies from fiery and raw to, well, fiery with interesting overtones.

Mescal is often considered the country-bumpkin cousin of tequila, which is also made from pulped agave, specifically blue agave from Jalisco. Many think tequila is to mescal as bourbon is to moonshine.

But some mescal makers dispute this notion. Ron Cooper, 62, an American who founded the Del Maguey Mezcal company, which, in small villages outside Oaxaca, makes several award-winning artisanal mescals.

Cooper described the taste of mescal in near-poetic terms. “Imagine a sweet potato, imagine caramel, imagine grass, all combined,” he said. “Imagine pumpkin like a pumpkin pie. It’s impossible to describe. How would you describe the flavor of a strawberry?”

He pointed out proudly that you won’t find anything curled up in the bottom of a Del Maguey bottle. And that brought us back to this worm thing.

It’s not clear who started the practice of preserving a worm (it’s actually a moth larva that feeds on agave plants) in bottles of mescal, but the first exports to the U.S. in the 1950s had worms. It became a sales gimmick for the rowdy, I’ll-do-anything-once crowd that’s often attracted to Mexican border cities.

In fact, Cooper, who grew up in California, had his first drink of mescal in 1963 at Hussong’s Cantina in Ensenada. “I was the fool who every night upended a bottle, waiting for the worm to come down,” he said in a phone conversation from his U.S. base in Taos, N.M. “Of course, I had horrible hangovers. I was an idiot. But that smokiness created an interest.” Thirty years later, he got into the mescal business.

The hint of smokiness and other subtle overtones is boosting mescal’s cachet. In the past few years mescal has begun to ditch the worm and its reputation as the drink of college louts. It also has begun to challenge tequila as Mexico’s export liquor of choice.

But none of this concerned us at first. For our 10-day Oaxaca trip last year, my wife, Jody Jaffe, and I had planned to explore the markets and villages, and eat every kind of mole possible. Ben wanted to immerse himself in colonial architecture; his brother, Sam Shepard, 17, wanted to practice his Spanish.

Then, Sam, a college lout wannabe, learned about the mescal connection, and we had to push worm hunting to the top of our to-do list.

We got our first taste of mescal on Mina Street, a few blocks from Oaxaca’s main downtown square or zocalo. Mina is the center of the city’s chocolate district. After sampling various sweets and watching them make mole at Mayordomo, the city’s biggest chocolatier, we walked a few doors down to a smaller chocolate place, La Soledad.

La Soledad not only sells moles and chocolates but also lots of local mescal brands. After offering us samples of chocolate, Juliana Morales Pacheco, 17, suggested a mescal tasting. Or was it Sam’s idea?

We began with joven or blanco, basically right out of the distillery; reposado, aged 6 months; anejo, aged 1 year; and gran reserva, aged 5 years or more. The older, the more expensive. The cheapest joven was around $3 a bottle; the top gran reserva at La Soledad cost $65 and wasn’t available for free tastings.

Some of the joven and reposado bottles were con gusano -- with worm. We looked closely: The glass magnified the contents, and we could see little feet.

Why were they in there?

“For flavor,” Juliana said.

The distinctions, with or without worms, were lost on us. As far as we could tell, each kicked like a mule and had the subtle overtones of turpentine. Two sips and Sam pushed away the shot glass.

Despite this setback, we pressed on. A day later, we stopped in a shop connected with La Reliquia, another local producer, and got an extensive lesson in mescal-ology from Barbara Logan, 56, a former English teacher and La Reliquia’s coordinator of international sales.

She explained the distillation process and gave us some political background. The industry is not only growing but also facing tumultuous times.

Once, nearly every village in these parts had its own mescal makers, but the government is tightening up on quality and forcing a complicated certification process on the local producers.

“There used to be 350 palenques in the area four years ago,” she said. Now, because of regulations and a growing shortage of agave, she said, only 11 certified and 60 uncertified remain.

“Mescal is a hard sell,” Logan said. “Drink bad mescal and the next day you’ll have a hangover, headache and feel horrible, horrible.” But “a good mescal will never give you a hangover.”

Logan offered to drive us to the La Reliquia distillery near Santiago Matatlan, about 35 miles away. What luck. It was only our second day on the mescal trail and we were getting an insider look.

As Logan poured us some samples of cremas -- milky mescals flavored with lime or coffee, coconut, pineapple, passion fruit -- she talked about the worm.

The whole worm tradition is baloney, Logan said. But she’s not against additives; in fact, like others in the business, she has tried scorpions.

“You drown the scorpion in mescal, they sting themselves and the poison flows. It changes the taste,” she said.

Still, we were game for more tastings. In the next few days we made day trips to several villages and, now that we had the mindset, we encountered mescal everywhere.

Lunching at the Azucena Zapoteca restaurant, not far from the village of San Martin Tilcajete, we got a shot of mescal for “courtesy.” In Santa Maria de Tule, we discovered a stand that offered crema de mezcal ice cream. An artists’ co-op outside San Pablo Etla used leftover mescal pulp to help make fancy paper.

Throughout, Sam was our main translator, verging on fluency. But by the time Ben swallowed the worm at Mezcal Beneva, Sam was having second thoughts about this mescal business. He declined the worm and barely tried the cremas.

After Mezcal Beneva, we stopped in at the tiny Don Gil Fabrica de Mezcal less than a mile away.

Don Gil had no fancy restaurant, no guided tour, no buses lined up outside. In fact, the fabrica doubled as his home: Chickens pecked around the grounds, toddlers played. But, as at all the palenques we visited, tourists were welcomed. Mescal makers uniformly seemed to be friendly, eager to pour a taste and explain the operation.

*

‘Handcrafted’

TWO days later, Barbara Logan drove us to the La Reliquia palenque in her boss’ ancient VW bug. La Reliquia was a far bigger operation than Don Gil’s. The building was fit for an industrial park and featured shiny stainless-steel vats and a lot of pipes and gauges that remind you of chem lab. Logan said the plant could make up to 7,800 gallons of mescal a year.

For all its modernity, La Reliquia still crushed agave by a horse-drawn grinding stone. Logan complained about this inefficiency, but every palenque in the Oaxaca area uses animal power, a fact that adds to the charm of the process.

“Mescal is handcrafted, as opposed to tequila, which is all industrialized,” Logan said.

The plant usually employs 15 workers, Logan said, but we were touring on a Sunday, and we met only chemist/quality-control expert Epitamia Martinez Marequez and her husband, distiller Isidro Martinez.

“Listen to the fermentation,” Isidro said as we walk by a big vat. “You can hear it bubbling.”

Making mescal is complicated. Even roasting the agave pineapples isn’t simple. La Reliquia’s outdoor fire pit -- about 8 feet deep and 15 feet across -- had seven layers: firewood, rocks, begaso (leftover fiber from past distillations), pineapples, begaso, canvas and dirt.

We drove to nearby Santiago Matatlan, which sits on the edge of a long, broad valley that’s checker-boarded with corn and agave fields. Replace the agave with vineyards and it would resemble California wine country.

A sign stretching over the main street proclaimed Santiago Matatlan “the mescal capital of the world,” and Isidro Martinez had told us there are about 40 palenques around town, including Mescal Beneva’s main distillery. Shops, bars and tasting rooms lined the main street, boasting various brands. It was like a honky-tonk Napa.

Logan stopped the VW at the town’s El Famoso palenque, to show us another mescal maker in action. Like Don Gil’s, El Famoso was a more traditional operation. There are no stainless-steel vats; the family lived by the facility.

A couple of days later, in Oaxaca city, we stopped by La Cava, one of the slickest shops in the city. The interior gleamed with chrome and polished wood. La Cava sold wines, hand-rolled cigars and specialty mescals, including house brands Los Danzantes and Alipus, and Ron Cooper’s various brands under the Del Maguey umbrella.

“We don’t have worms,” said Danzantes’ regional manager, Hector Vazquez, 31. “We’re trying to preserve the tradition. The worm is not tradition.”

Vazquez used wine words like “floral,” “explosive” and “smoky” to describe La Cava’s mescals. When we tried some, we got an inkling of mescal artisanship. His stuff wasn’t fiery, it was bracing.

Ben insisted they had overtones of something. Jody and I agreed, and although we may not have been falling love with mescal we appreciated it more. But Sam had reduced mescal tasting to a quick dip of his tongue in the glass.

Our final mescal adventure came on our last night in Oaxaca, when we visited Farola, the city’s most famous bar. Farola, founded in 1916, featured swinging saloon doors, a long polished bar and, that night, live music upstairs.

Manager Hilaro Alfonso, 40, took us under his wing. He brought us a sampling of El Rey Zapoteco brand mescals and a platter of Mexican botana -- free bar snacks. As we try blanco, gusano and reposado, he explained that Farola served 43 types of mescal -- 25 regulars and 18 cremas -- and sold 20 to 24 gallons a week. A bottle of blanco cost around $10.

As a woman sang dramatic love songs to the accompaniment of two guitarists, Alfonso gave us a brush-up course in mescal drinking: Toss back a shot and, before your throat can react, suck on a lime wedge -- not laden with worm but instead spiced with worm-and-chili-flavored salt.

Sam held up his hand in a gesture of surrender. “No mas, por favor,” he said, for all of us.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Spirit of Mexico

TELEPHONES:

To call the numbers below from the U.S., dial 011 (the international dialing code), 52 (country code for Mexico) and the local number.

MESCAL TASTINGS:

Azucena Zapoteca, Kilometro 23.5 on the Puerto Angel Highway (Highway 175), San Martin Tilcajete; 951-510-7884. On the way to some of the area’s well-known artisan villages. Combination restaurant and gallery. Bright, airy dining room, outdoor seating too. Soups, salads, local specialties.

La Cava, 212-B Gomez Farias, Oaxaca; 951-515-2335, www.losdanzantes.com. Open 10 a.m.-3 p.m. and 5-8 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays. Classy wine shop in downtown Oaxaca. Specializes in Danzantes and other boutique brands.

La Reliquia, 601 Independencia and 804 Morelos, Oaxaca. Mescal maker has two shops in downtown. The distillery is in Santiago Matatlan. Features the standard lineup of mescals and flavored versions such as pineapple and coconut.

La Soledad, 212 Mina St., Oaxaca; 951-51-658-41. Better known for its chocolates and chocolate making but has a large selection of mescals to taste and choose -- even mescal-filled chocolates.

Restaurante Rancho Zapata, Kilometro 42.5 on the Oaxaca-Istmo highway; 951-51-470-05, www.mezcalbeneva.com. Touristy but fun stop on the road to the mescal capital of Santiago Matatlan run by the Mezcal Beneva company. The rancho has a small operation that you can tour. Restaurant serves regional specialties, pastas, steaks, fish and has adjacent mescal-tasting bar.

La Farola, 3 20 de Noviembre, Oaxaca; 951-51-653-52. Probably the best-known cantina in downtown Oaxaca. Noisy, fun. Live music upstairs. Snacks and such for about $5.

La Casa del Mezcal, 209 Flores Magon, Oaxaca; 951-51-621-91. Another typical cantina; near the Juarez market. Lots of mescals to choose from and live music to drink it by.

TO LEARN MORE:

Mexico Tourism Board, (800) 446-3942 (for brochures) or (310) 282-9112, www.visitmexico.com.

-- John Muncie