Del Maguey Santa Catarina Minas Minero Mezcal

Del Maguey Santa Catarina Minas is a single village Minero mezcal from a dry, semitropical pocket of Oaxaca reached over a mountain pass beyond Chichicapa. It is an Espadin made by the palenqueros Florencio Carlos Sarmiento and his sons Florencio Carlos Vasquez and Luis Carlos Vasquez, true masters of their trade. Santa Catarina Minas is the clay pot heartland of Oaxaca, and the village name Minero signals that ancestral method. Del Maguey, founded in 1995 by Ron Cooper, names each bottling for the town behind it.
The spirit is distilled in the traditional Minero fashion using a still built of clay and bamboo, a wood fired ceramic apparatus that lends a soft, mineral and earthen character. That clay backbone frames a nose of floral essence, vanilla and fig, while the palate carries a burnt honey sweetness lifted by lemon, deep and warm with a sweet close. Bottled at 50%, it shows the texture and intensity of an undiluted clay pot mezcal.