Rezpiral - 2019 Tobala con Frutas Mezcal by Mezcalero Aureliano Hernandez

Rezpiral Mezcal - 2019 Tobala Con Frutas by Aureliano Hernandez

750ml

A note from Drammers Club: Our third mezcal pick for the club is INSANE.  Hopefully you’ve heard of a “pechuga” style mezcal — traditionally reserved for major celebrations in Mexico, they take an espadin mezcal (until now we’ve never seen anything except espadin used), and add fruits to the distillate, sometimes nuts, and hang some meat in the still.  Usually that’s a chicken breast (the word pechuga just means breast, but can be the breast of anything).  We’ve asked this question religiously on our trips to Oaxaca the last 3 years.  What makes a “real” pechuga?  Half the maestro mezcaleros answer it *must* be chicken that anything else is sacriledge.  The other half answer that anyone who tells you it’s chicken is lying — is *must* be turkey, because chicken is too greasy.  Occasionally you see other weird stuff like rabbit.  Interestingly, a lot of people, we’d even say *most* people say that the meat element is entirely window dressing and doesn’t survive the distillation process.  In contrast, the added fruits (and sometimes nuts) very obviously impacts the resulting flavor.  All of this brings us to this bottle.  It is a pechuga-style mezcal, using the fruits but not the meat.  What makes it insane is that instead of using the entry-level espadin agave, it is using a high end tobala agave!!!  That is unheard of — we’ve certainly never seen it before.  When we heard this existed, we jumped at the chance and bought out the remaining stock, so while a few bottles may still be out there in the wild, we got most of them.  Taste it to believe it, but this is magic.  Produced by maestro mezcalero Aureliano Hernandez, who we had the honor of visiting in person in October 2019.  This is as high end a mezcal as you can get.  And proud to partner again with Rezpiral on this.  The project grew out of a non-profit effort to support single-family producers and create a market for them in the USA, and even though it is technically a for-profit entity now, it is overwhelmingly a charitable effort, even growing wild agaves and giving them for free to family producers, only to buy it back from them at fair costs.  These are the good guys, glad to be on board supporting them, and we dare you to find a better or more unusual pechuga-style mezcal out there.  We’ve yet to find it!

This release is only available to registered Members and Observers of Drammers Club - More Information at Drammers.com

Drammers Pick #10