Montelobos Mezcal Tobala Joven

Tastings.com scored it 97, and Rolling Stone calls it one of the best tobalá mezcals on the market — because Montelobos took the hard route and farmed its own. Tobalá, the small, slow king of the wild agaves, has been over-harvested since the mezcal boom; Iván Saldaña, a molecular plant biologist who founded Montelobos in 2011 and sold it to Campari in 2018, pledged never to use wild agave, and met the Alva family in Puebla, who've cultivated tobalá for more than fifteen years without pesticides or herbicides. The Tobalá is that Puebla agave roasted in a stone-lined pit, milled, wild-fermented, and distilled in 300-liter copper stills, bottled at 46.8% ABV, kosher certified like the whole range; the name means mountain of wolves, and the brand funds the Wolf Conservation Center's Mexican wolf program. Montelobos' notes: lemon, green pepper, and pear, then citrus, basil, roasted fig, macadamia, and truffle. Mezcal Reviews' tasters: pear soda, lavender, ripe pear, vanilla, and cold butter, elegant and fruity with less smoke. Honest note, and it's split: Drinkhacker found solvent notes and wanted more fruit, while 88 Bamboo found it bright, fruity, and beginner-friendly — cultivated tobalá reads rounder and less wild than the canyon-grown stuff. Neat, in a copita, for a sustainable king. Puebla's farmed tobalá.

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