Del Maguey Single Village Wild Tepextate Mezcal

Tepextate is the long game — an Agave marmorata that grows wild on cliff faces and rocky slopes, sends up broad, marbled leaves, and takes twenty to twenty-five years to mature — and Del Maguey's Wild Tepextate came about when its tobalá producer offered Ron Cooper another rare agave. Cooper, the Taos artist who founded Del Maguey in 1995 on the single-village idea, added it to the Vino de Mezcal series from Santa María Albarradas, where the palenque of Rogelio Martínez Cruz and Leopoldino Miranda sits among fruit trees and rose bushes and the manantial spring water flavors the fermentation: wild tepextate, roasted in an earthen pit, crushed by tahona, fermented naturally, and twice-distilled in copper, bottled at 45% ABV. Master of Malt found a heady mix of passion fruit, cinnamon, and honeysuckle — wild, long-maturing agave giving elegance and grip. My Annoying Opinions, tasting lot TEP 181, found it more acidic and mineral than the Tobalá from the same palenque, with lime, green chile, salt, mild passion fruit, and charred pineapple. Expect the tepextate signature: a green, savory, almost vegetal funk on the nose over tropical fruit and florals, opening into a bright, mineral, faintly bitter palate with real structure, finishing long and dry. Honest note: it costs around $100, and it's an acquired, connoisseur's taste — the mezcal for drinkers who've worked through the gentler agaves. In a copita, neat, slowly. Twenty-five years, in a glass.

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