Mezcal Vago Espadin Emigdio Jarquin 2020

This is a single-maestro Espadin mezcal from Mezcal Vago, the multi-producer house built around the Garcia family of Oaxaca, with each bottle carrying the name of the maker. Emigdio Jarquin Ramirez distilled this batch in September 2020 at his palenque in Miahuatlan, working with Maguey Espadin, the cultivated Agave angustifolia that gives mezcal its balanced, citrus-leaning backbone. It is bottled joven to keep the agave and the roast in the foreground.

The agave is roasted in an underground pit, crushed with a stone tahona and twice distilled in a copper refrescadera, the second cooling pot common around Ejutla and Miahuatlan. Vago works in a traditional palenque without additives. At 50.2% the texture is thick and oily, warm and dry, with lemon zest and peppercorn up front, a brush of vanilla sweetness and faint blueberry and strawberry, closing on earth, minerals and a spritzy finish.