Mezonte Raicilla Tepe

Mezonte is the project of Pedro Jiménez Gurría, who started out pouring traditional agave spirits in a small bar in Guadalajara and built it into a nonprofit-minded effort to document and protect the mezcales of Jalisco and Michoacán, now imported by Suro, the team behind Siembra Valles. Tepe comes from Aciano Mendoza, a native of the Tepehuano community in Canoas, high in the mountains where Jalisco, Durango, Nayarit, and Zacatecas meet. The spirit is made entirely by hand: Mendoza harvests wild agave, the species changing from lot to lot (Masparillo for one release, Cenizo for another), roasts it in an underground earthen oven, crushes the cooked piñas by hand with wooden mallets, and distills on rustic stills he builds himself. The scale is tiny: lots run from about 100 to 250 liters, and one recent release yielded just 48 bottles. Mezonte's model is part of the point here: it buys small parcels from traditional producers at double the going rate, returns half of each batch to the distiller, and funds projects in the community. Because the agave and the lot change every time, each bottling of Tepe is its own thing, and none of it is made at commercial scale.

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