Q&A: Mezcal For Dummies with Niki Nakazawa, the Oaxaca-based co-founder of Neta

Mezcal is all the rage, but how much do you really know about Mexico’s storied spirit? I asked Niki Nakazawa, the Oaxaca-based co-founder of the agave spirits company Neta , to give me Mezcal For Dummies but, like the spirit itself, her answers were more complicated than just “buy this, not that.”An earlier version of this article included an editing error that mismatched the number of Mezcal-producing states in a sentence.

When you compare it to other spirits, the primary material is what’s unique to mezcal. Depending on the species, agaves can take anywhere from five to thirty years to be ready for harvest. And then you have the unique cooking process and fermentation, which in traditional mezcal is a natural, open-air ferment. Plus, there are different styles of distillation — you could be distilling twice in copper pots or using clay. There are so many diverse methods of production and they all affect flavor.

The more information you have on the bottle in terms of production the more likely that it’s an artisanal or traditional production. You want to know what agave it’s made out of. You want to know where it’s coming from. If it’s from Oaxaca, what part of Oaxaca? Who made it? What is the lot size?Neat. It’s not that mezcal cocktails aren’t delicious, but I think that it’s important to enjoy mezcal alone because of the tremendous amount of effort that goes into making it.

It’s easier for consumers to understand when you tell them the age of the plant. Fourteen years of taking care of a plant is expensive! And it takes a long time to make. The process between the cooking, the fermenting and the distilling can take three weeks from start to finish. There has been an effort made by Del Maguey and other brands to push education, and you have places like Mezcaloteca in Oaxaca, Pare de Sufrir in Guadalajara and Bósforo in Mexico City where people can taste and learn about mezcal.

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