Decades ago, Ron Cooper single-handedly architected Mezcal’s revival.  His unbending integrity and authenticity drew great people around him, organically; and those people continue to empower him.  His supporters—many of them among the most influential in matters of gastronomy—have never been driven by marketing budgets, nor multi-national corporate might but, rather, by the purity of Cooper’s quest.  Conversely, he has paid his partners in Oaxaca premium dollars, far above market demand, since the inception of Del Maguey, long before ‘fair-trade’ was a trend.  He was pre-green, pre-organic and he has built micro-economies in multiple villages throughout Oaxaca for more than fifteen years.  He is the embodiment of truth, la verdad.

As recently as a few months ago, the Bricia-Effect was born—a grassroots movement, resulting from one barman’s love for Del Maguey’s Mezcal Vida.  It was widely known that this product, in spite of being the most important addition to the Mezcal category in several years, would have no marketing dollars, ambassadors, nor payola to burn.  Thus, a new cocktail revolution was christened in honor of Bricia Lopez, a staunch proponent of Oaxacan culture and an integral figure in the gastronomic culture of Los Angeles.  “Bricia” cocktails began popping up all over the country—some are even rumored to have surfaced in London—and its original author was never compensated a dime.  When asked, he humbly responded: ‘it was the least that he could do for two people so great.’  How often does that happen?

For some of us, what Del Maguey represents transcends the booze business, entirely—it’s about protecting an ancient ritual that pre-dates the Spanish conquest.  Though you’ll hear a distinctly different, and inaccurate, tune up in Jalisco (unless you ask any of the remaining great makers).  Mezcal is the sacred physical incarnation of a fragile culture’s soul.  A spirit that has yet to be desecrated—in the name of progress and bottom line—as we’ve seen all over the world.  Each of Del Maguey’s villages—Chichicapa, San Luis del Rio, Santo Domingo Albarradas, Santa Catarina Minas, and a few others—are making their distillates exactly as they have for generations.  In the case of Santa Catarina Minas, it’s with a bamboo and ceramic still that was likely brought over decades before Columbus stomped American soil.

The second word of the day, of late, seems to be pueblo—used interchangeably with ‘village.’  If you have the great fortune of visiting the palenques of Del Maguey, you will experience true Single Village Mezcal production.  Santiago Matatlán and Tlacolula are not pueblos, nor villages.  Tlacolula is actually the county seat and home to the largest market in the region.  ‘Village’ means dirt floors, clean air and the absence of asphalt.  Frankly, it is glorious that all of these new brands have flooded the category—some of them well-made distillates—and it’s a sign that our culture is finally evolving.  But, it needs to be said here (because you won’t hear it elsewhere) that there is only one product commercially available in the United States which is a genuine, small-village, artisanal, farmer-produced Mezcal.  And, it is Del Maguey–and, by extension, Sombra.  These distillates are completely organic and unblended—the only yeasts present are those of airborne microbes, there has never been a single additive in any of the villages.  Del Maguey represents the mother of all agave-based distillates.  Same as it ever was.

Don’t take it from me—do a blind tasting of every artisanal, village Mezcal (and those purporting to be) commercially available in the US.  Not only will each Del Maguey Single Village Mezcal distinctly reflect its place of origin—its very dirt, soul and hand of the maker but it will reveal all others to be cheap imitations.  The Mezcals of Del Maguey are among the purest, most beautiful distillates on earth and, as of yet, they are entirely incomparable.

Del Maguey is truth.  Esto es la verdad.

Last night, I saw the best thing ever aired on the Food Network—something I’ve lost nearly all taste for.

It was from Season 7, Episode 01 – “Sturgeon” was the secret ingredient.
Iron Chef Michael Symon Vs. Chef David Adjey
Judges: Andrew Knowlton, John Curtas, Steve Olson.

John Curtas was as consummately negative and damning, as Olson was complimentary and empowering toward the cooks.  It was a reverse doppelganger, of sorts; Olson, of course, has dedicated his life to the noble preservation of gastronomic culture and expertise.  The other guy is apparently ‘eating Las Vegas’—the very thought of which inspires anxiety and nausea deep within me.  After Curtas heavily critiqued one of Symon’s dishes, Olson respectfully (while completely) disagreed with him—calling upon his professional ethos.  To which Symon responded something to the effect of: “I’m going to trust the guy with the world famous palate” (Olson).  I laughed so hard that my eyes hurt.

While deeply entertaining—it was also a victory. What Symon really meant was—I’m going to trust the guy who has turned a room three times on a Saturday night, opened some of the most celebrated restaurants in the country and educated the very stewards of our collective culture (who happens to have a supernatural, Zarathustra-like palate).  Respectfully, we should leave it to the experts.

p.s. If you haven’t seen Ron Cooper on Anthony Bourdain yet—it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen on the Travel Chanel.

Recently, a long-time friend and contentious collaborator stopped me mid-sentence—amid the fervor of one of my rants—and said: “Are you ever going to stop talking about ‘empowering experts’?”

When I first started thinking about this whole thing, over a decade ago—it was Aspen Food & Wine, 1998, where Jimmy Yeager, Steven Olson, Ron Cooper and I became friends—things were much different.  At the time, I was in the old publishing world, having recently purchased the most trusted, independent name in American wine magazines: the Underground Wine Journal.  It was the first time that I had seen Olson speak publicly—which happened to be at Jimmy’s Restaurant, talking about agave-based spirits (which happened to feature Cooper’s Del Maguey Single Village Mezcal).  Olson had effortlessly woven a timeless tapestry of geography, geology, history, world culture and a myriad of sciences. I was dumbfounded; never having seen anything like it.  A far cry from my press junkets, programmed visits to wineries and distilleries, and manufactured lunches with marketers.

It became increasingly alarming to me that in a hundred-plus-billion-dollar industry, so much power lay in the hands of a few corruptible people.  No fault to them as individuals—among them phenomenal minds and palates—but something as basic as a single human interaction with organic elements is a fragile and slippery slope. The ability to make or break families and communities—never mind their products—based on vacillating oligarchic whims and trends, seemed entirely unjust.  Moreover, it seemed completely contrary to this beautiful thing of libations—rooted in the ethos of sharing and mutual celebration—that which unites farmers and tycoons.  On these junkets, as a journalist, I would study my colleagues, their behaviors and methodologies, often skeptical about their integrity and motives.

Then, in great contrast, there was this invigorated, passionate community of professionals that I was getting to know.  I began looking at educators and consultants as essential counterparts to the famed quixotic winemakers and impassioned importers; sommeliers and bartenders as the ground forces—buyers and salespeople, making it all possible.

Every tasting panel that I organized thereafter would include at least one professional—ideally several.  Whether producers, sommeliers, small restaurant beverage managers, or buyers for high-end chains, their insight was inevitably crucial and distinctive.  It became increasingly disturbing to me that this community had limited reach and little-to-no direct interaction with consumers; this immense wealth of knowledge and insight was being overlooked.

Shortly thereafter, the internet bubble—and within it, some early adopters from the wine-space made big splashes, spent millions of dollars and earned fabled reputations.  The story of Wine.com alone is the stuff of Greek tragedies.  And, the problems that affected this convergence then are still the greatest failings of today.  The internet is chiefly comprised of two types of wine & spirit sites: those driven by techies who know nothing of wine & spirits and those of wine & spirit people who know nothing about technology.  There are, of course, a few exceptions—which are largely irrelevant for other reasons.

Enter web 2.0 and the dawning of anonymous, unqualified user-generated-content—aka the Cult of Amateur.   The vast investment into the internet-wine space over the past few years is unprecedented, as are the names flocking to the space—among them some of the biggest and brightest in venture capital and finance.  How some of these companies got funding—particularly the social networking copy-cats—is beyond my grasp.  The most distinctive commonality is that they all overlook the most credible, accountable and appropriate community in the world of wine & spirits: industry professionals, aka experts.  Simultaneously, the two chief traditional power-brokers of the print-world are coming under constant attack—as is their fragile credibility—from the growing online constituents, in great part, led by the bloggers.

Lest we merely mention Yelp—one of the most dangerous websites alive today (for just how long, nobody knows).  It should be noted that I was among the early adopters—when the community was dominated by foodies whose opinion actually meant something.  Also before they started blackmailing proprietors.  Their SEO has done very well for them—but their lack of credible, qualified content will be their ultimate undoing.  Aside from the fact that unqualified commenters—who are conveniently hiding behind pedestrian handles—are swaying public opinion, the company has impure intentions.

Having aggressively invested in this space over the past five-plus-years, the challenges facing a wine-web revolution are fairly obvious.  The VC firms follow trends, having ignored the mantra “change or die” the first time around, they’re primarily focused on two proven models: UGC-based social networking plays and Ecommerce.  The idea of empowering a community of professionals, while noble and perhaps just, doesn’t even cross their radar, fit in one of their boxes.  They will, of course, also challenge the ‘relevance’ and interest of the professional community; to this I say: compare wine & spirit industry professionals’ activity and following on Facebook today to where it was a year ago.  We went from three über-connected content providers (who had something to sell), to hundreds of tastemakers, celebrating products, places, ideas and each other.  Moreover, some of the movers and shakers—the more garish of whom shall remain nameless—have become trailblazers, not only for wine & spirits, but for web 2.0, as master manipulators of social media.

There are obvious inherent complications with the current VC approach—to include the backlash dubbed Revenge of the Experts, in which consumers are aggressively seeking professional knowledge, and the complete saturation of the ecommerce-space, where we have two looming behemoths: new entrant (again), Amazon.com and trail-blazers-turned-whistle-blowers, Wine.com, somehow still in the game.  Neither seems to have a grasp.  Meanwhile wine-clubs are sprouting up in every direction—Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Zagat, et al—some of whom are generating serious revenues.  But, where are the experts?

Somewhere in between, we see incomplete offerings like Nirvino, Snooth and WineZap; coupled with the looming vitality of direct-shipping companies.  Online wine sales continue to grow at inspiring rates, all the while; though as buying decisions become more crucial, expert guidance will inherently become a more valuable commodity.  One might imagine that it would be a lot easier to trust the collective opinion of a few dozen professionals, rather than buy whatever’s being sold by someone who is in the business of Ecommerce.

Every time a new wine & spirits-related site pops-up, and it seems to happen a few times a week, of late—to the tune of well over a hundred during the past year alone—the same thing happens.  I immediately rush to find out who is involved—or try to, anyway.  Inevitably, any site possessing of a half-way decent user-interface is devoid of serious authority.  Accordingly, sites posing serious wine & spirits authorities are technologically challenged; moreover, they are individualistic and have scarce chances of ever reaching critical mass.  The challenge is in finding an expert community with the breadth and resources to cover the span of consumer needs in a real-time, organic environment.

The answer: an independent, unbiased panel comprised of industry professionals—uncontrolled by hidden agendas or thinly-veiled self-interest. Rather than depend upon a single passing judgment—from one single person—an on-going organic body that discovers, shares and discusses wine and spirits, evolving collectively, naturally.  There is a need for an environment which encourages consumers to actively empower and collaborate with the professional community, and which supports professionals who genuinely practice the art of sharing.  These two worlds are often separated by misconceptions and intentional mechanisms.  Taste is solely subjective, while its collective representation is truly democratic—the wisdom of crowds cannot be swayed.  Especially when they’re experts.

So, will I ever stop talking about empowering experts?  Not any time soon.

This great photograph was taken by Tobin Sharp at Hi-Time Wine Cellars when Ron was visiting last February.

Asado Prieto
2 oz        Del Maguey Santo Domingo Albarradas
½ oz     Carpano Antica Formula Vermouth
½ oz    Fresh squeezed lemon juice
½ oz    Fresh squeezed lime juice
½ oz    Agave Nectar
1    Luxardo Marasche Cherry (soaked in Chichicapa mezcal)
3    dashes Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6
1     dash Angostura bitters

Pour first five ingredients in a tin-on-tin mixing glass with ice, shake and pour into a double Old Fashioned glass.  Dash bitters; garnish with a thin-sliced lime wheel, lemon skin and Luxardo Marasche Cherry.

For this cocktail, I used the Schott Zwiesel Paris Tritan Crystal Double Old Fashioned [which I got at Bar Keeper, in Silver Lake (where we get everything).  Joe has a ridiculous wealth of all things necessary—from the esoteric rarified to bar essentials—and his prices are fantastic].

As for the ice, we used the MoMa Japanese molds; I can only imagine the look on Ron Cooper’s face, between the spheres and the ‘precious’ ingredients.  Ironically enough, the end result is actually one of the most authentic expressions of the Palenques that I’ve experienced.  All of those ingredients actually marry to create a libation that transports you—one can actually smell the roast.

Enjoy.

Manzanita de Chimayo
1½ oz    El Tesoro Reposado Tequila
½ oz    Del Maguey Crema de Mezcal
1 oz    Apple juice (fresh pressed)
¾ oz    Lime juice (fresh squeezed)
½ oz    Agave nectar
¼ oz    Crème de cassis
1     Lime-cube (lime wheel frozen inside of two-inch ice cube)

Pour first five ingredients in a mixing glass; add ice, shake for at least one minute, strain into old-fashioned glass, with single two-inch lime-cube.  Delicately pour Crème de cassis directly onto ice cube, allowing it to slowly descend, creating contrast.

2005 Vieux Télégraphe Châteauneuf du Pape Blanc “La Crau”

Every once in a while something remarkable happens along one’s journey of endless discovery in the world of libations.  I have learned that, unless you spend a great deal of time traveling, there is usually an importer involved—a trail-blazer—names like Eric Solomon, Neal Rosenthal, Ron Cooper and, the incomparable Kermit Lynch.  He opened his doors in the year I was born, and his name was legendary, growing up in California.  He moved culture and changed lives, as evidenced by those who still seek his counsel; among them, Jim Harrison—the most important living American writer—who even writes in Kermit’s newsletter, on occasion.   In fact, Harrison, who eloquently while feverishly, discredited the 100-point scale—did so gracefully and categorically in that very newsletter.

People talk about eradicating snobbery in the wine world—this ongoing “issue” has its omnipresence well-rooted, amid a labyrinth of misconceptions.  But between people like Lynch and Harrison, there are no dragons to slay, only discoveries to be made.  It’s all about sharing openly, lovingly.  We tend to fear things we don’t know—it’s human nature, so we’re told.  This is ending with the coming generations, hungry for new experiences in a flat-world.  One such experience might be alternative white wines—getting away from the homogenized Chardonnay your grandmother knocks back—which is, thankfully, a far cry from the Lancers and Blue Nunn of my youth.

The 2005 Vieux Télégraphe Châteauneuf du Pape Blanc “La Crau” 13.5% [Kermit Lynch H. Brunier et Fils] is medium-gold in color; the bouquet is vibrant with youthful aromatics of ripe golden apples, pear and lemon—with candied undertones—pineapple, faint resin, Corinth raisins and fresh herbs. The palate is steely, great structure, with fat, round layers of flavor: pineapple, golden apples, tropical fruit, spice, fresh herbs; long, rich finish, candied lemon and sweet green apples; with lingering sweetness, faint tempered wood.  The palate is incredibly vibrant and bright.

The kicker: it is not known when this wine was actually opened—most likely 3-4 weeks ago—regardless it’s remarkable. How could this have happened?  Don’t ask.  It, somehow, wound-up in the back of the kitchen-unit, most likely a party.  The only other non-sweet white wine I have known to have this longevity is Joly.  And, Joly this is not; but it’s lovely, and incredibly distinctive.  Based on earlier experiences with this vintage, I would recommend decanting this bottle, or at least opening it a few days before you drink it.

You find yourself tearing down a seemingly endless dirt road in Ron Cooper’s Jeep—a rooster tail of dust marking a path as your body jolts in the backseat. The radio signal renders faint traces of a Mexican narco-ballad on the blown-out speakers, punc­tuating his diatribes on purity.

At this point, you’re living out a scene from Apocalypse Now. Then the stark landscape pulls you back: a labyrinth of trails among steep mountains adorned in a sea of maguey plants—the raw material behind mezcal, one of the most complex and misunderstood distillates on Earth. Your destination is a Zapotec village nestled along the Rio Hormiga Colorada, 8,000 feet up in the Oaxacan Sierra, where village elder and master mezcal distiller Paciano Cruz Nolasco awaits.

Hunched over the wheel is Cooper, the architect of mezcal’s resurrection, who has single-handedly revitalized the misunderstood Mexican spirit. His eyes gauge your awareness in the rearview mirror, and with a 500-foot drop a hair to your right, you realize you’re in the hands of a crusader and that his sense of danger is different from yours. They might someday write corridos about Cooper, chronicling his odyssey battling corrupt government regulators, multinational thugs and cutthroat rivals. But mostly they would speak of his drive.

Long before his tangles with mezcal, Cooper was looking for trouble. In his hometown of Ojai, he was surrounded by the likes of Jiddu Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts. That was before the demons were born, those that would forge his reputation as a “radical” at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, which he attended from 1963 to ’65, before leaving for “political reasons.” Lifelong collaborations were shaped there—Ken Price, Larry Bell, Terry Allen and Ed Ruscha among them. When pressed about his premature departure, he will only say, “I didn’t like the direction the school was heading.” Integrity is everything to Cooper.

His journey from artist to mezcal producer started with a single question on a summer night in 1970: “Do you think the Pan-American Highway really exists?” It was at Riko Mizuno’s gallery on La Cienega, after a group-show opening that included Cooper. Hopped up on Herradura and hubris, he—along with buddies Jim Ganzer and Robbie Dick—hastily piled surfboards atop a VW van and headed south. Four months later, they hit Panama. En route, the fabled highway led them to the village that Cooper and his company, Del Maguey Mezcal, now call home: Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca.

For Cooper, formative thoughts of Del Maguey began in 1990, and he started following rumors down dirt roads. But it was his art that inadvertently began his fascination with the spirit. Among his works—which have been featured at the Whitney, Guggenheim, LACMA and in a recent show curated by Dennis Hopper at Taos’ Harwood Museum—was the production of a sculptural limited-edition of 50 hand-blown blue glass bottles bearing the Aztec god of intoxication, Ometotchtli, meant to be filled with mezcal, the likes of which few foreigners had tasted.

When his zeal led him to try to cross the border with a five-gallon jug of sacred wedding mezcal—gifted by Zapotec farmers after an eight-day celebration—the Texas border patrol forced him to dump his beloved distillate. He obliged but says, “I decided right then and there I would go into the liquor business. Mezcal like this didn’t exist in the U.S.—nothing even close.”

Mezcal, one of Mexico’s national treasures and the mother of tequila, had long been forsaken for its corrupted daughter. Any time an agave-based distillate is made, it is called mezcal; thus, all tequilas qualify. Tequila is a region, like Champagne or Cognac. It was once called vino de mezcal de la region de Tequila. The clichéd notion of gusanos (worms) has no place in a serious conversation about mezcal. Since the 1950s, the entire category of mezcal had been hijacked by Mexico City marketers, who used lurid gimmicks to sell inferior spirits. The only notion of it in the United States was through false, adulterated products.

Of late, there has been an explosion of mezcal in the press—whispered about as the next spirits category. After years of the overmarketed artifice of big brands, the artisan cocktail movement raised the bar for quality along with its demand for authenticity. The purity of true mezcal took the industry by storm—its distinctive earthiness, herbaceous undertones and elegant smoky qualities taste unlike any other spirit. Bar chefs the world over are enthralled by it, and the reverberations have made their way down to the back roads of Oaxaca, where factories are sprouting up like golf courses in a desert.

Cooper is the least likely person to call this a sudden trans­formation, as he conceived of the metamorphosis more than two decades ago. Del Maguey calls its incarnation “single-village” mezcal. In essence, his methodology gives palenqueros (mezcal producers) the freedom to produce their libation using methods the indigenous people of Oaxaca have been employing for more than four centuries.

While mezcal is made in other parts of Mexico, Oaxaca has historically produced the most sought after renditions. The result is a distinct character and purity from village to village. The Zapotec people are up against multinational might and multimillion-dollar facilities—like those found in the state of Jalisco, where tequila is made—complete with laboratories and plush tasting rooms, and with minimal resources, they still produce a better product.

Unlike the nearest competition, these unblended spirits are made by family producers in remote villages with varying microclimates. Like their ancestors, they still make offerings to deities, in exchange for permission and blessings, before harvest­ing for the revered spirit, which they regard as a spiritual entity.

While Del Maguey distillates have always been organic, they are also approved by OCIA, making them one of the first mezcals in the world with organic certification. There are just two ingredients: water and piñas—aka the heart of the maguey—which are roasted over hot stones, covered with earth and eventually mashed in either horse-drawn stone mills or by men with mallets, depending on the village.

After completely natural fermentation in wooden vats, the liquid is distilled in wood-fired clay or copper stills, true to its 16th-century roots and, as Cooper says, “leaving room for the will of God and maguey in the bottle.”

Steven Olson, renowned wine and spirits expert, has exalted the virtues of Cooper’s Del Maguey Single Village Mezcal for more than a decade, calling it “the most complex, versatile and rarefied distillate on earth.” Internationally celebrated gastronomic innovator José Andrés—of the Bazaar at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills—says Cooper’s creation is “the best thing a man can put in his mouth.” They share an affinity for his Pechuga mezcal, from the village of Santa Catarina Minas—among the most scarce and coveted bottling on earth. But for Cooper, it’s really about his passion for preserving a culture.

Cooper was green and organic long before such concepts were popularized. Del Maguey pays fair-trade premiums over and above local industry standards and encourages educational programs to achieve sustainable production. Among the locals who are directly impacted by the efforts of Del Maguey are 150 women from two villages who weave traditional palm-fiber bottle covers, a family of ceramicists who make the company’s signature sipping cups and employees of the bottling facility. Each bottle’s top is hand-dipped in organic beeswax recycled from the local church’s offering candles, bringing yet another spiritual layer to the process.

Del Maguey has worked to expand the consciousness surrounding the native cultures of Oaxaca and mezcal as a spirits category. Cooper has taken ambassador palenqueros to the United States to be celebrated as true artisans, and hundreds have in turn visited the palenques of Del Maguey. It has become a right of passage among international libation cognoscenti. And it is within this group that Cooper has found a sense of community and vitality he hasn’t experienced since the art scene of L.A. and New York in the 1960s.

“But they better enjoy that sense of communality now,” Cooper cautions, “because the zeitgeist won’t last long with commercialism chipping away at its soul.” And while he has benefited from the artisan cocktail movement and a demand for higher quality spirits, in the absence of this culinary craze, he’d still be living in a Zapotec village among these people.

The sacred nature of Del Maguey is a natural outgrowth of Cooper’s unbending ethos and residual principles from the hippie era. “When it was just me, Pancho and the Indians, we were living in paradise, surrounded by the most gracious, beautiful people on earth,” he says nostalgically. Pancho Martinez, the oldest of four brothers, who has been Cooper’s right hand for nearly two decades, is a master Zapotec weaver and the stubborn keeper of customs for his bloodline.

Things changed, seemingly for the better, in February 2005, with the coming of NOM (Norma Oficial Mexicana) federal production regulations—think FDA for spirits—which Cooper welcomed in his quest to eliminate adulterated mezcal from the marketplace. However, with the Mexican government’s push for purity came a thirst for increased tax revenues. “You can’t have a verifier looking over your shoulder all the time when you’re making art or mezcal—it spoils the heavenly transcendence you feel when you’re right on,” Cooper says.

As Hopper, his friend for more than four decades, explains, “Ron’s art was always forward thinking. He created work using minimal materials before others even thought about doing it.” The same sentiment could obviously be applied to Cooper’s focus on mezcal—in terms of both vision and materials.

Does Cooper still find time for artwork? To those who would unwittingly pose the question, he might just look at you—fire in his eyes—and say, “What the f–k do you think this is, man?”

Article originally featured in LA Times Magazine, November 2009
by Wyatt Peabody / photographs by Lloyd Ziff / produced by Jennifer Stockley